AI Isn’t Banning Books in Iowa Schools. Republicans Are.

It reads like a headline pulled from a dystopian near future: Artificial intelligence is being used to ban books by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou from schools. To comply with recently enacted state legislation that censors school libraries, Iowa’s Mason City Community School District used ChatGPT to scan a selection of books and flag them for “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.” Nineteen books — including Morrison’s “Beloved,” Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner” — will be pulled from school library collections prior to the start of the school year.

RUSSIAN PURGE The Horror Story of Publishing Children’s Books in Russia

I WALK IN ON a minor crisis at Samokat, a children’s publishing house in Moscow. The commercial director, Gleb Kochnev, is telling the editor-in-chief, Irina Balakhonova, that there is a problem in a book they have just published.

The book is called Say Hi to Me, it is a primer on refugees for elementary school children, and it contains a map of Russia and its neighbors. One of the countries on the map is Georgia, which Russia invaded in 2008, biting off two small regions. The regions have since declared independence, which is recognized only by Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and the island microstates of Nauru, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu (though Tuvalu later reneged and Vanuatu seems to have had second thoughts). The map in the book shows the regions as being part of Georgia — the way most of the world sees it. But federal law dictates that any published map must reflect Russia’s official view of the world, which is that these tiny regions are independent. It is not clear what the penalty for violating this provision may be, but it’s clear that it spells trouble.

The Printed Word and the New Literary Elite

As our cultural products are digitized, the book-as-artifact takes on new cultural meaning.

If you’ve been reading of late, you will surely have read that books are going out of style, and fast. Headlines proclaiming the ruination of literature and accompanying doom of civilization have graced the pages of nearly every heavyweight paper in some form or another. In 2007, The New Yorker’s Caleb Crain lit the literary flame with his Bradburian headline, “Twilight of the Books: What will life be like if people stop reading?” Following this, as is so often the case, was a retort from The Guardian’s Steven Johnson, telling Crain and The New Yorker to get a grip – the medium was the message here, and the message was that people are still reading (perhaps even more than before), just not in print. And for a trend that’s already been observed in a myriad of other cultural arenas – the shift from vinyl to mp3, analog to digital, etc. – it seemed a logical evolution.

The digitization of a cultural product feels inevitable, even destined to happen, leaving some to wonder how this hitherto entrenched progression of technology has possibly surprised anyone.