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.’”

    • Adramis [he/him]@beehaw.org
      91·
      1 year ago

      There was literally an article either yesterday or the day before with the headline “AI being used to ban books in Iowa” or something to that effect.

        • dax@beehaw.orgEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          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.

    • chameleon@kbin.social
      51·
      1 year ago

      The argument does exist. This article by PEN America is one of the most widely spread ones and largely misrepresents the situation. It’s based on a PopSci article with a similar headline, though the contents of the article tell a rather different story.

      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).