Help Us Investigate Book Bans and Educational Censorship Around America
Over the last few years, some of our more meaningful (and unfortunately bleakest) reporting has been on the many ways in which the right wing has systematically targeted libraries, schools, authors, and educators over the things they teach, specifically with regard to the teaching of systemic racism, LGBTQ+ issues, science, and sex education. These targeting efforts have led to a widespread, highly successful effort to ban books, restrict curricula, harass and oust teachers and librarians, and broadly censor the educational system. This movement has leveraged these successes to seize power not just in city councils and local school boards but has succeeded in making censorship and “anti wokeness” one of the dominant political ideologies in the United States.
We have successfully gained access to public records that show, for example, how a local group in Idaho successfully got a police officer to go hunting for “obscene” books at the public library, the playbook behind getting "Drag Storytime" library events canceled, how superintendents in Florida couldn’t figure out how to comply with the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, and have spoken to numerous librarians, scientists, and professors to learn how educational freedom, free access to information, and historic archives are under attack. Today—which happens to be the fourth day of Banned Books Week—we are proud and excited to announce that we will be continuing and ramping up this work over the next year with the help of a grant from our friends and colleagues at government transparency nonprofit Muckrock, with support from the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. (We’re also excited to partner with Muckrock on this new piece of limited edition merch it made for Banned Books week).
From our proposal: “Book banning and educational censorship (the banning of LGBTQIA+ studies, the study of slavery and systemic racism, the war on “DEI” and trans people) has become a political cudgel and core rallying point for the current administration. These bans have been pushed through by organized groups such as Moms for Liberty and high-profile politicians, and impact the daily lives, careers, and future prospects of students, their families, and teachers, while simultaneously managing to become a core part of the culture war. These documents about censorship are themselves difficult to obtain and are at risk of being memory holed and forgotten about without a systematic effort to obtain, publish, and archive them. This project will show how censorship works and will shed light on the sheer scale of these censorship efforts, at a time when public trust in the government is at an all-time low.”
Over the next few weeks, we will be filing hundreds of public records requests with state, local, and federal governments and school districts with the hope of unearthing more information about the groups, politicians, and monied interests that have been pushing book bans and educational censorship on American public schools and libraries. As we get these documents back over the course of the next few months, we will be making them available to the public through Document Cloud, with the hopes of creating an enduring archive of public records about educational censorship in the United States. We will also, of course, be reporting on the documents we get back and will be turning them into articles that you can read on 404 Media.
As always, we will need some help from our readers. We need help deciding what to look for, which school districts and cities to seek public records from, and need leads on where we should point our reporting efforts. During the height of the pandemic, many city councils made their meeting minutes and meeting transcripts searchable, so we have a good sense of the types of organizations and communities that have been most severely affected by educational censorship and book bans, and have a good idea of where to get started. But if you are a librarian, teacher, educator, parent, local politician, or activist who is aware of systemic efforts to ban books, censor curricula, defund libraries, or otherwise attack educational freedom, please let us know by emailing jason@404media.co or by reaching out to Jason securely over Signal at jason.404. And if you want to further support this work, you can do so by becoming a paid subscriber or by donating to our tip jar.
Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books
Reference librarian Eddie Kristan said lenders at the library where he works have been asking him to find books that don’t exist without realizing they were hallucinated by AI ever since the release of GPT-3.5 in late 2022. But the problem escalated over the summer after fielding patron requests for the same fake book titles from real authors—the consequences of an AI-generated summer reading list circulated in special editions of the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year. At the time, the freelancer told 404 Media he used AI to produce the list without fact checking outputs before syndication.“We had people coming into the library and asking for those authors,” Kristan told 404 Media. He’s receiving similar requests for other types of media that don’t exist because they’ve been hallucinated by other AI-powered features. “It’s really, really frustrating, and it’s really setting us back as far as the community’s info literacy.”
AI tools are changing the nature of how patrons treat librarians, both online and IRL. Alison Macrina, executive director of Library Freedom Project, told 404 Media early results from a recent survey of emerging trends in how AI tools are impacting libraries indicate that patrons are growing more trusting of their preferred generative AI tool or product, and the veracity of the outputs they receive. She said librarians report being treated like robots over library reference chat, and patrons getting defensive over the veracity of recommendations they’ve received from an AI-powered chatbot. Essentially, like more people trust their preferred LLM over their human librarian.
“Librarians are reporting this overall atmosphere of confusion and lack of trust they’re experiencing from their patrons,” Macrina told 404. “They’re seeing patrons having seemingly diminished critical thinking and curiosity. They’re definitely running into some of these psychosis and other mental health issues, and certainly seeing the people who are more widely adopting it also being those who have less digital literacy about it and a general sort of loss of retention.”
As a reference librarian, Kristan said he spends a lot of time thinking about how fallible the human mind can be, especially as he’s fielding more requests for things that don’t exist than ever before. Fortunately, he’s developed a system: Search for the presumed thing by title in the library catalog. If it’s not in the catalog, he checks the global library catalog WorldCat. If it isn’t there, he starts to get suspicious.
“Not being in WorldCat might mean it’s something that isn’t catalogued like a Zine, a broadcast, or something ephemeral, but if it’s parading as a traditional book and doesn’t have an entry in the collective library catalog, it might be AI,” Kristan explained.
From there, he might connect the title to a platform like Kindle Direct Publishing—one way AI-generated books enter the market—or the patron will tell him their source is an AI-powered chatbot, which he will have to explain, likely hallucinated the name of the thing they’re looking for. A thing that doesn't exist.
As much as library workers try to shield their institutions from the AI-generated content onslaught, the situation is and has been, in many ways, inevitable. Companies desperate to rush generative AI products to market are pushing flawed products onto the public that are predictably being used to pollute our information ecosystems. The consequences are that AI slop is entering libraries, everyone who uses AI products bears at least a little responsibility for the swarm, and every library worker, regardless of role, is being asked to try and mitigate the effects.
Collection development librarians are requesting digital book vendors like OverDrive, Hoopla and CloudLibrary to remove AI slop titles as they’re found. Subject specialists are expected to vet patron requested titles that may have been written in part with AI without having to read every single title. Library technology providers are rushing to implement tools that librarians say are making library systems catalogs harder to use.
Jaime Taylor, an academic library resource management systems supervisor with the University of Massachusetts, says vendors are shoehorning Large Language Models (LLMs) into library systems in one of two ways. The first is a natural language search (NLS) or a semantic search that attempts to draw meaning from the words to find complementary search results. Taylor says these products are misleading in that they claim to eliminate the need for the strict keyword searches or Boolean operators when searching library catalogs and databases, when really the LLM is doing the same work on the backend.
“These companies all advertise these tools as knowing your intent,” Taylor told 404 Media. “Understanding what you meant when you put those terms in. They don’t know. They don’t understand. None of those things are true. There is no technical way these tools can do that.”
The other tool Taylor is seeing in library technology are AI-generated summaries based on journal articles, monographs, and other academic sources through a product called AI Insights, which incorporates new information into an existing LLM with a system called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Taylor and colleagues have found RAG doesn’t really help improve the accuracy of AI-generated summaries through beta testing AI tools in library tech for companies like Clarivate, Elsevier and EBSCO.
“It reads everything on both pages,” she added. “It can’t tell where the article you’re looking for starts and stops, so it gives you takeaways from every word on the page. This was really bad when we tested it with book reviews, because book reviews are often very short and there’ll be half a dozen on one page, which would end up giving us really mixed up information about every book review on the page, even though the record we were looking at was only looking for one of them, because it was a scanned page from an older journal.”
Taylor says neither type of product is ready for market, but especially not the AI summaries that do what an abstract does but a lot worse. She’s turned what ones she can off, but expects fewer vendors will allow her and other librarians to do so in the future to record more favorable use cases. The problem, she says, is these companies are rushing products to market, making the skills academic librarians are trying to teach students and researchers to use obsolete.
“We are trying to teach how to construct useful, exact searching,” she said. “But really [these products’ intent] is to make that not happen. The problem with that in a university library is we’re trying to teach those skills but we have tools that negate that necessity. And because those tools don’t work well, you’ve not learned the skill and you’re still getting crap results, so you’re never going to get better results because you didn’t learn the skill.”
Plenty of library workers remain cautiously optimistic about the potential for generative AI integrations and what that could mean for information retrieval and categorization. But for most librarians, the rollout has been clunky, error-filled and disorienting, for them and their patrons.
“As someone who feels like a big part of my job is advocacy for the position, for the principles of the profession, I am here to not look at whether a resource is good or bad,” said Kristan. “I don’t look at the output, the relationship that it has with the patrons, and what it’s being used for in the long run of the future. Like, I’m not out here just breaking looms and machine weaving machinery just for the hell of it. I’m saying this is not good for the community and we need to find equitable alternatives to ensure that things are going well for the lives of our patrons.”
Readers Annoyed When Fantasy Novel Accidentally Leaves AI Prompt in Published Version, Showing Request to Copy Another Writer's Style
A scammer left glaringly obvious evidence of using AI to write portions of a fantasy novel and even tried to copy the style of a real author.Victor Tangermann (Futurism)
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