“Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream,” the 1990 non-fiction bestseller by H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger about a prominent west Texas high school football team and societal issues in its Odessa, Texas home is one of 19 books recently removed from school shelves in Mason City.
Others include Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple,” Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy,” and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
“I’m flattered to be in the same company,” Bissinger said by phone Wednesday. “These are great, great books.”
The rest of what he said wasn’t so flattering, and with good reason.
Iowa Senate File 496, passed this year, requires every book available to students be “age-appropriate” and free of any “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” according to Iowa Code 702.17.
Mason City Community School District Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction Bridgette Exman said it was “simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements.” So, as Popular Science reported this week, that district is using ChatGPT. That’s an artificial intelligence software, to help provide textual analysis of each title.
“This use of AI is ridiculous,” Bissinger said, “There’s no sex at all. I’ve never depicted a sex act. I don’t know what the (expletive) they’re talking about. I purposely stayed away from that.”
As for the book possibly not being age-appropriate?
“My book is being falsely depicted,” said Bissinger. “The tragedy is, this is a great book for kids. It is a great book for teenage males because they don’t like to read anything. But they devour this book, and I know because I’ve had over 30 years of emails telling me that.