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Edition 1

100 Banned Books

Curated by ChatGPT


100 Banned Books is a collaboration between NothingToSee® and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It is a response to an increasingly hostile landscape for a free press in the post-COVID age, and a statement of solidarity for those reporting the truths of our time.

The collection features 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 two reasons:

1. The inherent value of first editions in the rare books market—some of which are valued at upwards of a million.

2. The nature of Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, which are created out of vast libraries of human-generated text data. In other words, LLMs are aggregators of the output of human intelligence, and become mirrors to human civilisation.

100 Banned Books signals a pivotal shift in the rare books and first editions industry. As the practice of writing becomes automated and subsumed by AI, the value of historically authenticated, human-generated books become even more precious—both as literary artifacts and as commodities.

However, this collection is more than just an archive. As an artistic intervention, it 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 serving only as an observer and mediator.

The prompt is deceptively simple: What are the top 100 banned books in history?

Yet, this question 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, can it make moral or ethical decisions without experiencing the impact of those decisions?

• If LLMs reference only the past and predict the future based on pre-existing datasets, can they ever be truly neutral?

Discussions about AI remain largely technical, with ethical and philosophical implications still in their infancy. 100 Banned Books invites this conversation into the present.

As we transition into an era of coexistence with artificial intelligences that may far exceed our own, we must ask: How will we navigate these new, unprecedented dynamics of power?

This project challenges ChatGPT to engage with an ethically ambiguous task, offering an early glimpse into how AI might handle complex philosophical problems—or perhaps exposes the fundamental limits of LLMs in shaping the future of human thought.

At its core, 100 Banned Books is a reminder that what is deemed acceptable or unacceptable today may be nothing more than common sense tomorrow. It urges us to cultivate wisdom in times of transition, and to approach new technologies with both curiosity and caution.


Curator’s Statement

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.


  1. 1984, George Orwell
  2. 120 Days of Sodom, Marquis de Sade
  3. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
  4. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
  5. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Through the Looking Glass, or What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll
  6. A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
  7. A Separate Peace, John Knowles
  8. American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
  9. Animal Farm, George Orwell
  10. Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, Judy Blume
  11. As I Lay Dying,  William Faulkner
  12. Beloved, Toni Morrison
  13. Black Boy, Richard Wright
  14. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
  15. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
  16. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
  17. Candide, Voltaire
  18. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  19. City of Night, John Rechy
  20. Crash, J.G. Ballard
  21. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, Libri VI, Nicolaus Copernicus
  22. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
  23. Fahrenheit 451, JD Bradbury
  24. Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk
  25. Flowers For Algernon, Daniel Keyes
  26. Flowers in the Attic, V.C. Andrews
  27. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
  28. Go Ask Alice, Anonymous
  29. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
  30. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
  31. Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling
  32. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
  33. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
  34. In the Night Kitchen, Maurice Sendak
  35. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
  36. Junky, William S. Burroughs
  37. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence
  38. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
  39. Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis
  40. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
  41. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
  42. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
  43. Malleus Maleficarum, Heinrich Kramer
  44. Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
  45. Native Son, Richard Wright
  46. Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
  47. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
  48. On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
  49. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
  50. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
  51. Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing
  52. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
  53. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
  54. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
  55. The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine
  56. The Anarchist Cookbook, William Powell
  57. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X and Alex Haley
  58. The Beautiful and the Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  59. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
  60. The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
  61. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
  62. The Chocolate War, Robert Cormier
  63. The Colour Purple, Alice Walker
  64. The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
  65. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
  66. The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio 
  67. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
  68. The Giver, Lois Lowry
  69. The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein
  70. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls
  71. The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman
  72. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
  73. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent, and Richard Leigh
  74. The House of Spirits, Isabel Allende
  75. The Joy of Sex, Alex Comfort
  76. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
  77. The Last Tempation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis
  78. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
  79. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
  80. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
  81. The Obscene Bird of Night, John Donoso
  82. The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski
  83. The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
  84. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
  85. The Satanic Bible, Anton LaVey
  86. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
  87. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
  88. The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd
  89. The Story of O, Pauline Reage
  90. The Story of the Eye, George Bataille
  91. The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
  92. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
  93. The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall
  94. The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
  95. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
  96. This One Summer, Mariko Tamaki
  97. To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  98. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
  99. Ulysses, James Joyce
  100. Wild Seed, Octavia Butler

 
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100 Banned Books is presented by NothingToSee® and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

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