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?

  • lemontree@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    I would go back a few years and ask: Should i let a 16 year old use search engines?

    Probably not too different

    • PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.