[ItsBob]

They worry me. A lot.

My son is 15 and I use Google Family Link to control what he does on his phone: it's pretty open for the most part (I receive notifications of installs) but Gemini is a hard-ban.

We've spoken at length of the dangers.

He says his pals use LLMs frequently and I suspect that's the reason for their test scores: some of them are in the 20% - 40% range for tests whereas my son is 80%+ because he studies past-papers and answers questions in his revision.

I worry for the future coz you can be sure that the AI providers don't care if a schoolchild is using their LLM to answer the homework questions.

[zuzululu]

and this is why standardized testing exists so they can apply those off hour work and discipline to demonstrating their aptitude for being comfortable with boredom long enough to function in academic and workplace environments that require it.

rather than perceiving AI as a danger you should be looking at how he can leverage it to accelerate and enhance his learning but the political environment focus on removing standardized testing to hide data of those that traditionally fail is the true danger.

[ItsBob]

Sorry, but it's a hard "no" on that. It's a danger at age 15!

I guarantee that without constant supervision, he'd use it for everything.

[thierrydamiba]

Did your son behave in a way for that to be installed or did you do it by default?

[eunos]

> Gemini is a hard-ban.

Sounds like you would hard-ban your son from using Internet if it was only introduced 5 years ago

[ItsBob]

No, that's not the case and I don't think comparing Gemini and the internet is the same.

The internet (to stretch your analogy) is more like a shit load of library books that you have to look through but Gemini is the guy that goes and reads the books for you and tells you the answer.

I'm not saying they don't have their uses for me as an adult (I'm a software architect), but for a 15 year old, they absolutely do not have their uses! At all.

At age 15 you know nothing about life. You should learn it yourself, not be told it!

[eunos]

Remind me during my early college days in which they even discourage you from using Eclipse or NetBeans during intro to programming class.

Only notepad allowed. So much fun memorizing Java util imports.

[bcrosby95]

Or a calculator. Oh wait, I hard ban my 8 and 11 year old kids from using a calculator. I wonder why.

[CamperBob2]

That... is not a good idea.

Inexpensive calculators were relatively new when I was that age, and I learned so much just playing with them.

[LtWorf]

What exactly did you learn?

[CamperBob2]

Among other things, I learned that I was really, really into computing machinery.

[CamperBob2]

(I also learned that a lot of people on Hacker News have absolutely no business on a site called 'Hacker News.')

[LtWorf]

I did repeatedly hack my university though. But you are of course free to leave :)