Conservative parents’ advocacy groups have been experimenting with using commercially available artificial intelligence tools to help them flag more books they’ve deemed pornographic to be removed from public schools and libraries. Even though LLMs are notoriously error-prone, and the books in question aren’t pornographic, these groups continue to explore use cases for AI anyway.

One such experiment indicates a desire to accelerate content production of book reviews for conservative book-rating sites. BLOCKADE, which stands for “Blocking Lustful Overzealous Content, Keeping Away Depravity and Extremism,” relies on xAI or OpenAI API keys to generate book reports from PDF/ePUB files, basing the analysis on a set of parameters that are publicly available through the creator’s Github page.

The program’s script includes a list of roughly 300 words, each assigned a severity score that contributes to an overall appropriateness score based on their own metrics. The script explicitly defines “educational inappropriateness” as “content offensive to conservative values,” while also asking the AI “not to include any additional text or explanation” for its decisions.