What are pros and cons of doing this? What impact it will have on the personality / mind of the person down the line after say 10 yrs?
I would go back a few years and ask: Should i let a 16 year old use search engines?
Probably not too different
That’s exactly my perspective.
I came of age with the birth of the web. I was using systems like Usenet, gopher, wais, and that sort of thing. I was very much into the whole cypherpunk, “information wants to be free” philosophy that thought that the more information people had, the more they could talk to each other, the better the world would be.
Boy, was I wrong.
But you can’t put the genie back into the bottle. So now, in addition to having NPR online, we have kids eating tide pods and getting recruited into fascist ideologies. And of course it’s not just kids. It’s tough to see how the anti-vax movement or QAnon could have grown without the internet (which obviously has search engines as a major driver of traffic).
I think you’re better off teaching critical thinking, and even demonstrating the failings of ChatGPT by showing them how bad it is at answering questions. There’s plenty of resources you can find that should give you a starting point. Ironically, you can find them using a search engine.
For fun? It’s probably fine. As a substitute for human interaction and learning? No, no one should use chatgpt that way
I agree with those saying you can’t/shouldn’t forbid it. As someone in computer science, the important thing to me is to make sure they understand what those LLMs are and aren’t. Specifically, the ‘M’ in “LLM” is for “model” - they’re a detailed model of what a conversation should look like, especially what a response to a question should look like. But looking right is different from being correct. You can ask one for a mathematical proof and it will give you one that looks right, but it probably won’t be.
The other thing I’d try to get them to understand is that the leaning part of school is much more important than the grade part, especially if they’re going to go on to college. They could use an LLM to help them create a term paper, but if they didn’t learn anything it’s going to catch up to them and cause problems down the road.
I’ll be honest, if I got it at 16, I would fuck around with it for a few weeks and then get bored
To use as a tool? Yes.
To use as a friend? No.A person using a tool for a longer time will become better in using said tool.
Treat it like a calculator that has a 75% chance of giving the wrong answer.
Not to be contraversial, but likely chatgpt would be the most benign conversation a 16 year old will have in a day. 16 year old! Thats a crazy age.
The public models are so neutered today that basically all they put out is happy shiny good thoughts information.
I don’t think there will be any change in personality or cognition just by using ChatGPT. The only concern I can think of is over reliance. Especially if your child intends to goto post secondary school. Universities are very strict regarding plagiarism and view AI generation as such. If they can use it responsibly there no downside, if they’re going to use it to start to do their homework for them it’ll be a problem.
