Ask HN: Give 8 year old access to Chat GPT? My 8 year old daughter loves using Chat GPT / Dall-E to generate images. She also loves to ask the AI questions. Has anyone given their child access on their own device (she has an iPad) and had any good / bad experiences? Any thoughts on how to do this in a way that doesn't expose her to everything in the world? |
In the same vein, I encounter this issue with Midjourney. My nine-year-old enjoys using Midjourney to create images, but I'm concerned about her ability to chat with strangers on Discord.
As you should be. For anyone else who might be on the fence about this, take a look at this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJEvA7Plr78
The AI on the other hand is designed to avoid hurting people's feelings even though it often fails or gives incorrect answers, it's damage is not seeking you out. I don't have children but if I did I want to believe that I would either not give them any technology or give them all of it and try to show the importance of critical thinking on the side (though they may do it naturally without your help, only one way to find out).
Great question by the way.
1. LLMs are I think pretty inarguably bad at answering certain types of questions in a factually accurate way, at least without nontrivial prompt engineering. I don't think many 8 year-olds will recognize which types of questions the LLM will give inaccurate answers to, or be ready for the sort of prompt engineering that'd be required to mitigate this.
2. Learning is of course more than simply obtaining and memorizing facts. You don't want to overfit your kid - you want them to have to struggle a bit for their understanding so that it generalizes. Sure, formulating questions is part of that process, but there's something to be said for having to sift through pages of search results (or even better, from a learning standpoint, searching through the pages of a book they had to find on a library or bookstore shelf). It's like the old idiom, give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime. Better to teach your kid to fish (and for knowledge/understanding, not mere facts).
As for image generation, I suspect you'd find more inappropriate content come up there than with a chatbot - and teaching the kid to draw, paint, etc would probably be better for their development.
I wonder how would LLM compare to average pre-internet adult an 8 year old might have access to. People are also bad at accurately answering questions.
EDIT: And to be clear, yes, books were conveying information from other adults. But 1) the capital requirements of engaging or operating a printing press meant that there was some gatekeeping (for better as well as worse) concerning which adults' views made it into print, and 2) there were things like peer review and other social technologies to increase confidence in the accuracy of the information contained in books, i.e. to make that gatekeeping more than merely economic. LLMs are ingesting the unfiltered thoughts of anyone with internet access, and then noisily producing outputs based on them (with some limited inexpert human fine-tuning at the end).
I probably wouldn't give her access to chatgpt, but more for dislike of my kid's chats being stored with a corporation that will use it for something. That is the reason kid's email is protonmail and calendar is in nextcloud.
I would consider setting up https://ollama.ai/ ? You can run it locally and because it is smaller not as smart as state-of-art LLMs, it could train them better to be wary of the more advanced version.
We’ve started with social messaging for kids under 12, that includes a kid friendly GPT bot they can interact with... Genie.
DM me for early beta access.
Beta site: https://beta.genie.gg
Assuming that a given LLM was trained on N percent of the Internet, then exposing your kid to that LLM is, given sufficient time and API spend, exposing them to everything in that N percent.
So, I leave it to you to determine how comfortable you are allowing your child to more or less freely experience N percent of the Internet.
So as things go, its pretty tame, and way better than unsupervised social media or Google access.
Keep logs, review anything that needs attention. Don't keep it a secret. Make sure they view it as a tool.
I would be so much farther ahead if I had chatGPT to answer all my questions at 8 years old. I had books, at least.
Then again, could also backfire or negatively impact output quality.
That's what the base model does. To get an LLM assistant there are additional training phases to make it conversational, helpful and more correct - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZQun8Y4L2A