Author Brad Meltzer reacts after the York, Pa., school district banned his children's book, 'I Am Rosa Parks,' along with others that involve race and history. A school district in Iowa used artificial intelligence to examine library books and help identify which contain sexually explicit material that needed to be removed from school property to comply with a new state law. In May, Republican Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a parental rights bill, which requires all books in public school libraries describing sex acts be removed. The law took effect July 1. To comply with the new law, the Mason City Community School District got creative and used artificial intelligence technology to sift through voluminous amounts of text and determine which books were subject to removal.

It certainly didn't take long for AI's other shoe to drop, what with the emergent technology already being perverted to commit confidence scams and generate spam content. We can now add censorship to that list as the Globe Gazette reports the school board of Mason City, Iowa has begun leveraging AI technology to cultivate lists of potentially bannable books from the district's libraries ahead of the 2023/24 school year. In May, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed, and Governor Kim Reynolds subsequently signed, Senate File 496 (SF 496), which enacted sweeping changes to the state's education curriculum. Specifically it limits what books can be made available in school libraries and classrooms, requiring titles to be "age appropriate" and without "descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act," per Iowa Code 702.17. But ensuring that every book in the district's archives adhere to these new rules is quickly turning into a mammoth undertaking.