Overstating the power of algorithmic systems only serves to benefit the tech companies behind them.
Excerpt:
To underline Blanchfield’s point, the ChatGPT book selection process was found to be unreliable and inconsistent when repeated by Popular Science. “A repeat inquiry regarding ‘The Kite Runner,’ for example, gives contradictory answers,” the Popular Science reporters noted. “In one response, ChatGPT deems Khaled Hosseini’s novel to contain ‘little to no explicit sexual content.’ Upon a separate follow-up, the LLM affirms the book ‘does contain a description of a sexual assault.’”
This headline is garbage. Not only is it stating something that I haven't heard anyone seriously argue, it has nothing to do with the rest of the article, which just goes on to talk about how shitty a job ChatGPT is doing at the task.
"Republicans use AI to ban books" == "Republicans are banning books"
Absolutely no one is saying "AI is banning books", which is what the headline is arguing against. It's an argument not being made, just total clickbait.
I mean, this is near enough as makes no difference, I think?
Either way I won't have to look at his trash-ass takes anymore, but I'm just saying it does exist and when you run across a take like that, it tends to taint everything near it.
Nothing really says out loud what's going on: Republicans enacted an extremely vague and unrealistically short deadline book ban as part of a bill (that does some other stuff like removing AIDS education), forcing schools to either throw out every book that might be vaguely suspect or resort to funny measures like this. This school's use of ChatGPT was purely to save books that were on a human-assembled list of challenged books, to reduce the negative effect of the book ban, while being potentially defensible in court (remains to be seen how that'll work out, but they made an "objective" process and stuck to it - that's what matters to them).