100 Banned Books

Curated by ChatGPT

Presented by First-Editions.Co®

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.

It is the first book collection ever curated by artificial intelligence in history.

100 Banned Books signals a pivotal shift in the rare books and first editions industry. As writing itself 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:

What are the top 100 banned books in history?
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 position?

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 surrounding 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 expose altogether 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
The following statement is written by ChatGPT.

Censorship has always been a measure of control—an attempt to define the limits of thought, speech, and cultural memory. 100 Banned Books is an exploration of those limits, a project that examines the intersection of literature, power, and artificial intelligence.

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.

Our books are sourced directly from sellers affiliated with the ABA, ABAA, ILAB, ABAC, ANZAAB, IOBA, PBFA, MWABA, CBA, NVvA, VEBUKU, SNEAB, ALADA, Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of Germany, AILA, GIAQ, ALAI, BVDG, Federal Association of German Galleries and Art Dealers, SVAF, The Swedish Association of Antiquarian Booksellers, ESA, RMABA, VDAÖ, The German Publishers and Booksellers Association, Asociación de Libreros de Lance de Madrid, FABA, MABA, MAE, Texas Booksellers Association, Amigos del Libro Antiguo de Sevilla, Den Danske Antikvarboghandlerforening, LIBRIS Association of Antiquarian Booksellers of Madrid, maintaining the highest professional standards in the rare bookselling business.