[ladzoppelin]

"Every underprivileged child could have a personalized tutor." Tutor for what, prompt engineering? The impact of this on the kids is hard to fathom and just because "similar" advancements in the past opened up doors does not mean this one will as well.

[tetris11]

I think it's more that the (ad-riddles, SEO-centric) internet is no longer the education tool it used to be, but chatgpt is. I asked it to walk me through cross-compiling for an old NAS, how to setup Ethernet over coaxial in my custom setup, what legal advice.I should take,etc etc. It did not give perfect answers, but the answers were good enough to build upon, and after working with of for so long, it really feels like it's a friend that's trying to help.

I can definitely picture this being a personal tutor to a child

[ryanjshaw]

Do you have kids? My young child wants to "ask the AI" stuff all the time - which is a relief, because I'd much prefer that over giving them full Internet access until they're mature enough. AI is a huge accelerant for childhood learning.

[autoexec]

Either way you'd have to be watching what the kid was asking and making sure what they found was accurate and appropriate. I don't think I'd trust an AI trained on random crap found on the internet to teach my children unattended any more than I'd trust youtube's algorithm to feed them video suggestions all day without oversight.

Not only would I be risking my kids being exposed to things that were outright wrong or entirely inappropriate, but I'd also be missing the opportunity to discuss their questions and the answers with them, provide context, and learn new things myself in the process.

[AlecSchueler]

Sounds like school.

[autoexec]

Thankfully teachers don't usually get their degrees by reading social media posts and whatever else they happened to find on the internet. That said, you should absolutely be paying attention to what your kids are (and more importantly aren't) being taught in schools too.

[AlecSchueler]

They don't get their degrees that way, but they absolutely do use social media and have their views shaped by it. ChatGPT is also trained on a lot more than social media, you can be sure it's read a lot of scientific literature as well.

But yes, you're final point is the one I'm getting at: You should be actively monitoring and explaining what your child is being told whether it comes from a human or an LLM.

[catchnear4321]

Tutor for whatever the kid has the curiosity to ask.

You don’t need to be a “prompt engineer” to get use out of a language model. You just have to recognize what it is, and what it isn’t.

If that can’t be taught to children, there’s no sense fretting over AI. We don’t need it to fail.

[throwoutway]

I'd rather kids not be taught by something that hallucinates and spits out accurate-sounding lies. The education system is already struggling to teach kids to read and has been removing math from california schools (two front page news here this week). Adding a lying tutor should be classified as child neglect.

That said, I like the AI, but only as an adult who has enough training to question whether I'm being lied to by an auto regressive Turing machine.

[naveen99]

Newspapers and the government already basically spit out accurate sounding lies all the time also.

[catchnear4321]

it would make a poor tutor for you. even as an adult.

go find examples of the lying tutor you hypothesize - you might just find smart kids extracting value from chaos. your fears will not deny them that.