A new state law, Senate Bill 13, prohibits school library materials with profane content or indecent content from campuses.
The law went into effect this school year, and it puts the onus on school staff to make sure materials are in compliance. It can be daunting task to make these determinations with hundreds of thousands of books in any given school library. For help, school staff are turning to ChatGPT.
Bayliss Wagner, who covers state politics for the Hearst Austin Bureau, said SB 13 specifically requires school boards to approve all requests for new library materials.
“One district that I focused on, Pearland outside of Houston, has 20,000 students. And so their purchase list for the month of November was 1,400 books,” she said. “The school board said it seems like the law wants us to review these books, but there’s no way we can read all of them. So they put the law, the language of SB 13 … into ChatGPT. And they asked it to let them know if any of the books on that list might flag a violation.”