Why is a chatbot deciding what books our children read?
From our UK edition
A school in Greater Manchester has stripped 193 books from its library because they are ‘inappropriate’, liable to upset pupils and thus a safeguarding risk. Among the dangerously destabilising material: Michelle Obama’s memoir and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Who was entrusted with identifying these literary IEDs? An over-zealous head? A prurient librarian? A demented child psychologist? Nope. A humble AI bot. While writing my latest novel, The Hawk Is Dead, much of which is set in Buckingham Palace, I asked ChatGPT to produce a simple floor plan. Not a tough assignment – much less taxing than diagnosing nearly 200 books as existential threats to adolescent wellbeing. It got the Palace’s orientation wrong. For more than 200 years, the East Wing has faced the Mall.
