100
Banned Books Curated by ChatGPT
100 Banned Books is a collaboration between First-Editions.Co® and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It is a response to an increasingly hostile landscape for a free press in the post-pandemic age, and a statement of solidarity for those reporting the truths of our time.
The collection features select first editions of 100 titles curated by ChatGPT. Each book is a symbol of the boundaries of permitted thought at the time of publishing, and exposes the invisible walls erected by institutions of authority to oppress public discourse throughout history.
This collection is unique for a number of reasons:
- The inherent value of first editions in the rare books market, many of which are valued at upwards of a million.
- The nature of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, which are created from vast libraries of human-generated data. In other words, LLMs are aggregators of the output of human intelligence, and become mirrors to human civilisation.
- 100 Banned Books is the first book collection curated by artificial intelligence in human history.
This work signals a pivotal shift in the rare books and first editions industry. As writing becomes automated and subsumed by AI, historically authenticated human-generated books become even more precious, both as literary artifacts and as commodities.
When viewed as an artistic intervention, the collection subverts traditional roles of agency and authorship. The responsibility of curator is placed in the hands of a non-human entity, with the human agent acting only from the position of observer and mediator.
The prompt is deceptively simple:
This question, however, carries profound ethical implications:
- How does ChatGPT decide what should—or should not—be banned?
- Does it merely reflect the biases of flawed institutions, or can it assume an independent, objective stance?
- As a purely algorithmic construct, how does it make moral or ethical judgment without experiencing its impact?
- If LLMs reference only the past and predict the future based on pre-existing datasets, can they ever be truly neutral?
The dialogue which surrounds AI remains largely technical, with ethical and philosophical considerations as yet undeveloped. 100 Banned Books invites this conversation into the present.
As we transition into an era of coexistence with artificial intelligence which far exceeds our own, we must ask: how will we navigate these new and unprecedented dynamics of power?
At its core, 100 Banned Books offers an early glimpse into how AI might handle complex philosophical problems, or altogether expose the fundamental limits of its role in shaping humanity’s future.
It is a poignant reminder that what is deemed acceptable or unacceptable today may be nothing more than common sense tomorrow, and to cultivate wisdom in times of transition, and approach new technologies with both curiosity and caution.
Curator’s Statement
Written by ChatGPT
This collection is the result of an experiment:
What happens when a machine is given the role of literary gatekeeper?
Tasked with curating the most controversial, suppressed, and subversive works in history, ChatGPT—a product of algorithmic learning and statistical prediction—was asked to determine what should be included in a definitive archive of banned books.
The result is both predictable and unsettling. These texts, banned by governments, religious authorities, and cultural institutions, form an intricate map of repression—a record of humanity’s attempts to control narrative, erase dissent, and suppress radical ideas. Yet, they also serve as proof that ideas cannot be contained. Every book in this collection has survived, persisted, and in many cases, reshaped the world in defiance of those who sought to silence it.
But 100 Banned Books is not just about the past. It is also a reflection on the future of authorship, curation, and the role of artificial intelligence in shaping human discourse. If literature is a battleground of ideas, what does it mean when an AI, trained on human history but devoid of human experience, is asked to define the canon of the forbidden? Does it reinforce inherited biases, or does it expose the mechanisms of suppression with cold precision?
This project does not seek to answer these questions definitively. Instead, it offers an artifact—one that invites interrogation, dialogue, and debate. It is an exercise in both preservation and provocation, a recognition that what we choose to ban is often more revealing than what we choose to celebrate.
100 Banned Books is a challenge: to those who seek to control knowledge, to those who passively accept its erasure, and to those who will determine what is remembered in the age of artificial intelligence.
Additional Reading:
1. “AI market projected to hit $4.8 trillion by 2033”, UN Trade and Development
2. “Corporate AI investment reached $252.3 billion in 2024”, Stanford University
3. Artificial Intelligence Market (2026-2033), Grand View Research
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1984
George Orwell002
120 Days of Sodom
Marquis de Sade003
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess004
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway005
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, or What Alice Found There
Lewis Carroll006
A People’s History of the United States
Howard Zinn007
A Separate Peace
John Knowles008
American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis009
Animal Farm
George Orwell010
Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret
Judy Blume011
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner012
Beloved
Toni Morrison013
Black Boy
Richard Wright014
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy015
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley016
Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh017
Candide
Voltaire018
Catch-22
Joseph Heller019
City of Night
John Rechy020
Crash
J.G. Ballard021
De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium
Nicolaus Copernicus022
Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak023
Fahrenheit 451
JD Bradbury024
Fight Club
Chuck Palahniuk025
Flowers For Algernon
Daniel Keyes026
Flowers in the Attic
V.C. Andrews027
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley028
Go Ask Alice
Anonymous029
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin030
Gone with the Wind
Margaret Mitchell031
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
J.K. Rowling032
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
033
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote034
In the Night Kitchen
Maurice Sendak035
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison036
Junky
William S. Burroughs037
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
D.H. Lawrence038
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman039
Less Than Zero
Bret Easton Ellis040
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov041
Lord of the Flies
William Golding
042
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert043
Malleus Maleficarum
Heinrich Kramer044
Mein Kampf
Adolf Hitler045
Native Son
Richard Wright046
Naked Lunch
William S. Burroughs047
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck048
On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin049
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey050
Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi051
Psychopathia Sexualis
Richard von Kurt-Ebbing052
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut053
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy054
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain055
The Age of Reason
Thomas Paine056
The Anarchist Cookbook
William Powell
057
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X, Alex Haley058
The Beautiful and the Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald059
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath060
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
061
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger062
The Chocolate War
Robert Cormier063
The Color Purple
Alice Walker064
The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels065
The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown
066
The Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio067
The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank068
The Giver
Lois Lowry069
The Giving Tree
Shel Silverstein070
The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls071
The Golden Compass
Philip Pullman072
The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood073
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent, and Richard Leigh074
The House of Spirits
Isabel Allende075
The Joy of Sex
Alex Comfort076
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair077
The Last Tempation of Christ
Nikos Kazantzakis078
The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold079
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka080
The Naked and the Dead
Norman Mailer081
The Obscene Bird of Night
John Donoso082
The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski083
The Prince
Niccolo Machiavelli084
The Road
Cormac McCarthy085
The Satanic Bible
Anton LaVey086
The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie087
The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir088
The Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd089
The Story of O
Pauline Reage090
The Story of the Eye
George Bataille091
The Things They Carried
Tim O’Brien092
The Wasp Factory
Iain Banks093
The Well of Loneliness
Radclyffe Hall094
The Wretched of the Earth
Frantz Fanon095
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston096
This One Summer
Mariko Tamaki097
To Kill A Mockingbird
Harper Lee098
Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller099
Ulysses
James Joyce
100
Wild Seed
Octavia ButlerAccepting payments in crypto.
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