404 Media: “‘BLOCKADE’: The Right is Using AI Content Scanners to Try to Supercharge Book Banning”

From 404 Media (by Claire Woodcock): 

Conservative parents’ advocacy groups have been experimenting with using commercially available artificial intelligence tools to help them flag more books they’ve deemed pornographic to be removed from public schools and libraries. Even though LLMs are notoriously error-prone, and the books in question aren’t pornographic, these groups continue to explore use cases for AI anyway.

One such experiment indicates a desire to accelerate content production of book reviews for conservative book-rating sites. BLOCKADE, which stands for “Blocking Lustful Overzealous Content, Keeping Away Depravity and Extremism,” relies on xAI or OpenAI API keys to generate book reports from PDF/ePUB files, basing the analysis on a set of parameters that are publicly available through the creator’s Github page.

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Intellectual freedom advocates are alarmed by the frequency in which censors rely on AI to help them determine what books to remove from public spaces. When BLOCKADE is finished interpreting conservative values to mean whatever xAI or OpenAI’s LLMs say they mean, it builds a risk profile for the book that the user can then export as a PDF that looks a lot like the book reviews organizations like Moms for Liberty popularized before AI chatbots were on the market. The format has inspired numerous copycats from organizations that take the idea a step further, using heat maps to monitor books they don’t like that remain available in school libraries by aggregating data by state, district, school building and the number of books in circulation. In other instances, activists use social media channels to highlight their experiments with using AI chatbots to challenge passages for possible violations of state laws.

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Public records obtained by 404 Media from the New Braunfels Independent School District northeast of San Antonio show the district has heavily invested in AI to screen books for content that would violate one of the state’s numerous book ban laws, particularly SB 12 and SB 13.

Emails from the company to the district include phrases like, “the real power of your OnShelf dashboard isn’t just the list of books; it’s the book intelligence behind that list,” before promising to give customers a “truly defensible process” that “allows you to build a review process you can stand behind” and promises more context for what the AI flags and why. This includes AI content analysis, live landscape monitoring of what the public and activist groups are saying about the book and whether other districts have retained or removed certain books.

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Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Dashboards, Data Files, Libraries, Maps, News, Reports, School Libraries