The system has already flagged 19 titles for removal.

Iowa School District Utilizing Artificial Intelligence to Censor Books

The dark side of AI has quickly emerged, as it is now being misused for confidence scams and spam content. Adding to this list is the recent case of censorship, where the school board of Mason City, Iowa is reported to have started using AI technology to create lists of books that could potentially be banned from the district’s libraries for the upcoming 2023/24 school year, according to the Globe Gazette.

In May, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed and Governor Kim Reynolds later signed Senate Bill 496 (SF 496), which enacted sweeping changes to the state’s curriculum. It specifically limits what books can be made available in school libraries and classrooms, requiring titles to be “age-appropriate” and without “depicting or visual depictions of a sexual act,” according to Iowa Code 702.17.

But making sure every book in the district’s archives complies with these new rules is quickly becoming an enormous undertaking. “Our classrooms and school libraries have vast collections of purchased, donated and found texts,” Bridgette Exman, Mason City Community School District’s assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, said in a statement. “It’s simply not possible to read every book and sift through these new requirements.”

As such, the Mason City School District is bringing in AI to parse suspicious texts for disallowed ideas and descriptions because there are simply too many headlines for human reviewers to handle alone. By district, the “master list” is first compiled from “multiple sources” based on whether there are previous complaints of sexual content. Books on that list are then scanned by “AI software” — the district doesn’t specify which systems are used — that tells government censors whether the book actually contains depictions of sex.

“Honestly, we have more important things to do than spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to protect kids from books,” Exman told PopSc via email. “At the same time, we have a legal and ethical obligation to comply with the law. Our goal here is really a defensible process.”

So far, the AI has flagged 19 books for removal. They are as follows: