As a growing number of states pass or propose restrictions on what books children can access in school libraries, authors and advocates are concerned about the role artificial intelligence is increasingly playing in books being removed from shelves.
"This phenomenon of using AI to guide removals will worsen the snowball effect of book bans that has already gone much too far," the free speech advocacy group PEN America said in a report it published during Banned Books Week in early October.
Some districts have had AI review their collections to flag certain types of content and make recommendations on what to remove. Critics argue that AI can hallucinate, take passages out of context or recommend a book be removed simply because another district did,
leading to more and more titles being restricted in schools.
The first known example of AI being used for such purposes was in 2023, when an Iowa school district used it in response to legislation prohibiting books depicting sex acts in school libraries. Several Texas districts followed in 2025, according to the Houston Chronicle.
The Florida Freedom to Read Project reported in October that a local school district's use of AI to scan library collections led to more than 1,800 titles being removed from shelves to undergo further review.
"We've crossed the Rubicon," Maggie Tokuda-Hall, an author and co-creator of Authors Against Book Bans, told USA TODAY. "We're in a really different place."
Texas, Florida lead nation in book bans
A few states have become hotbeds for the book ban fight.
A Utah law requires that if three public school districts, or two school districts and five charter schools, take a title off library shelves, all public and charter schools must follow suit. There are 44 books currently banned statewide under the law, according to PEN America.
The organization's October report found that Texas and Florida's bans made up more than 11,400 of the nearly 12,000 total book bans recorded during the 2025-2026 school year.
Texas enacted a law in 2025 that prohibits schools from having library materials with "indecent" or "profane" content, and Florida has sought to impose similar restrictions for several years.
The Florida Department of Education sent a memo in September to the state's 67 public school districts, as well as charter schools, that directed them to review their library collections and compare them to the department's list of books that have been removed from schools around the state.
"Make no mistake, the Department will hold districts, and the superintendents who lead them, accountable for failing to protect students from inappropriate content and material," Florida Education Commissioner Henry Mack wrote.
Critics of such efforts have argued that other education issues are of greater concern to parents. A Knight Foundation report in 2024 found that more than three-fourths of all adults felt "very or somewhat confident that local public schools select appropriate books," including nearly 90% of public school parents, more than 60% of conservatives and 69% of Republicans.
"These are not things public school parents want prioritized right now, and yet it's being amplified at the state level," Stephana Ferrell, director of research and insight at the Florida Freedom to Read Project, said.
Dueling perspectives on whether AI harms or protects
Others, however, have argued that restricting certain books is necessary to protect children from potentially harmful content.
Among the most prominent groups in the effort is Moms for Liberty, which describes itself as the nation's "largest grassroots organization fighting for parental rights." Its chapters have called for scores of titles to be removed from school library shelves, including Colleen Hoover's "It Ends With Us," "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini and John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men."
In October, the group announced a new AI tool to scan school board meeting agendas and identify topics related to “parental rights, free speech, the curriculum and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.”
A spokesperson for the organization told USA TODAY it may also be used on school library collections. Ultimately, however, they said the group believes AI recommendations should always be followed by human review.
“Anyone who blindly trusts AI to make decisions for them is using it in an irresponsible manner,” the spokesperson said.
They also argued that a school district not having a book on its library shelves does not prevent a parent from allowing their child to access it elsewhere.
"The standard in Florida and Texas is clear: sexually explicit material does not belong in a school library for children," the spokesperson said.
Though it's been a hot-button culture war issue in recent years, the nation has debated book bans before.
James Joyce's 1922 work "Ulysses" was deemed legally obscene and faced a nationwide ban until a court reversed it in 1933. J.D. Salinger's 1951 classic, "The Catcher in the Rye," has stirred controversy for decades and was the 10th-most challenged book of the 1990s, according to the American Library Association.
A book that was even more widely challenged in that decade was "Heather Has Two Mommies," a 1989 children's book about a young girl raised by lesbian parents. But the book's author, Lesléa Newman, told USA TODAY that while there have been longtime battles over her work, as well as other books with LGBTQ+ themes or written by non-White authors, she's noticed a change in recent years.
“Things have really escalated in a way that’s very disturbing and frightening,” she said.
Statewide bans now affect dozens of titles, Newman noted.
Others echoed Newman's concerns in interviews with USA TODAY, also pointing to a shift in who is challenging books. What used to be a primarily local conflict between individuals − a single concerned parent and school or district officials, for example − has scaled to a much broader level. According to the American Library Association, pressure groups, government officials and other decision-makers were behind more than 90% of all book challenges in 2025.
Author Lee Wind, whose 2021 book, "No Way, They Were Gay? Hidden Lives and Secret Loves," has faced several bans, criticized what he called "very calculated" attacks on books and said book bans further marginalize certain groups, such as the LGBTQ+ community. Adding AI into the mix stands to make the issue even bigger.
“I think all it’s doing is empowering people that want there to be fewer books about diverse people in public spaces to do it more thoroughly,” he said.
The future for book bans
Authors and advocates had different perspectives on what they see as the future of book bans as AI becomes increasingly ubiquitous. Sarah Lamdan, executive director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, told USA TODAY she has some optimism that the trend will taper off.
"One thing that gives me hope is people are becoming fatigued by AI, and the overuse of AI, and the use of AI in contexts where maybe it shouldn't be used," she said. "People are wary, hopefully, of replacing human judgment, human deliberation, human connection with bots."
Others weren't as hopeful.
Kris Austin, CEO of Draft2Digital, a self-publishing and distribution platform for independent authors, pointed to the "negative feedback loop" created by having more state restrictions alongside more advanced AI.
"The next time we see this data, it's going to be worse," he said. "It's going to be shockingly worse."
BrieAnna Frank's role covering First Amendment issues at USA TODAY is made possible by a collaboration among Freedom Forum, Journalism Funding Partners and the USA TODAY Network. Freedom Forum does not provide editorial input. Reach BrieAnna at bjfrank@usatoday.com and @brieannafrank on X and Bluesky.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How AI is reshaping the fight over banned books
