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Is it a good idea to let a 16 yrs old use an AI assistant .i.e. chatgpt? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] AFKBRBChocolate 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Yeah having an open and honest conversation seems like the best thing, but that requires Parent here also understanding it, but that's a good time for both of them to look into it and learn more.

The biggest thing is going to be something along the lines of "I know you're going to want to use this for homework, but I want to ask you to please not just use it as a way to get the answer. This very well may be a tool that helps you understand problems better, we all learn differently and maybe this can help explain confusing questions to you in a way that you can understand, but if you just ask for the answer you won't learn anything".

Being honest with them on why you don't want them to just plain use it will go a long way. Teens are (in some ways) smart, they know if you're just forbidding it that there's probably a reason but that you don't want to explain it, and so they'll rebel and use it more. Being honest and explaining your reasoning will usually sit longer with them. Sure, they'll probably say "What is X?", but maybe they'll adjust it to say "Can you show me how to solve for X?"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Yeah, I would heartily recommend LLMs being used in education as a tutor and "homework buddy". I find their interactive nature to be really useful for learning stuff - I'm always able to ask "wait, what did that bit mean?" or "Walk me through this part." The LLM isn't always right, but with that back-and-forth it's quick to catch errors.

[–] AFKBRBChocolate 3 points 5 months ago

I agree with all of that, well said.