Censorship Is So 1984. And Yet, Here We Are.

It’s Wednesday, smack in the middle of Banned Books Week—a week that shouldn’t have to exist, but does. Once upon a time, America called itself the land of the free. Today, we need a designated calendar slot to celebrate the books our leaders don’t want us to read. A week to remind ourselves that free expression is now a curated privilege.

The American Library Association announced this year’s theme: “Censorship Is So 1984. Read for Your Rights.” Which sounds witty and almost retro, except it’s chillingly literal. Orwell’s 1984 is no longer a warning—it’s a playbook.

Here’s the irony that keeps me up at night: the very books being pulled from shelves are likely feeding the machine of artificial intelligence. The same banned texts are training the very AI systems that many of the book-banning crowd are heavily invested in. Think about that for a moment. The gatekeepers want to keep these works out of your hands, but they’re perfectly fine letting their machines ingest them wholesale.

When I asked ChatGPT whether it was trained on banned books, here’s what it said: yes—at least for public domain works like Ulysses, Huckleberry Finn, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and The Communist Manifesto. Copyrighted modern texts like Gender Queer or All Boys Aren’t Blue aren’t ‘officially’ in its training set, but their reviews and discussions are. In other words: AI gets to learn from diverse perspectives, even if we don’t.

That’s the hypocrisy. The very people funding AI’s future seem desperate to restrict our present. They don’t trust us with books, with nuance, with complexity. But they trust their machines to absorb it all. It’s almost funny—except it isn’t. Because the stakes are our ability to reason for ourselves, to imagine for ourselves, to think outside the confines of whatever sanitized “official story” we’re allowed.

So this week, I’m rebelling in the simplest way possible: I’m picking up a banned book. Looking for Alaska by John Green. It’s about a 16-year-old named Miles, which also happens to be my son’s name. A coincidence, but a meaningful one. If the next generation is going to inherit a world of curated thought, the least I can do is hand my Miles stories that make him think freely. You can read the book report here.

If you want to do the same, here’s a curated list of actions you can take to resist censorship and defend the radical act of reading.

Because let’s be honest: the people who want to ban books? They’re the ones who most need to read one.