There is no universe where an LLM helps one learn to read. You need to be able to read first to use one, and worse yet, you need to be able to think critically about the outputs, not just decode and sound out the letters.
LLMs are able to talk for a very long while now. Have you ever used Gemini as an assistant? It can even put in related images about your query and while it can use an improvement it can spell more or less.
I think it heavily depends on person, generalizing it as a tool that avoids thinking and learning is also wrong because I have personally used it to tacke some subjects myself and it helped me learn quite well.
I'm honestly jealous of the kids. When I was 13 I was looking at books in the school library from the late 70s and early 80s about astronomy. They had beautiful shots from Voyager 1 and 2 and lots of illustrations but ultimately there was very little math in there and not too much hard science besides some basic statistics. I would have loved to have a conversation with those books.
> I would have loved to have a conversation with those books.
I am not sure. It would be like sending a kid to a beautiful garden with full of life and stuff, and then micromanaging what they can do there!
The beauty of the books is that the books talk to you, and you cannot talk back. You have to talk to yourselves, go down some wrong path, and course correct on your own at some point, and that is where true learning happens..
The thing I think is underspoken in this space is that LLMs will always hallucinate a bit. How will you know as a 13 year old that an LLM is not conversing truth at you?
My teachers were frequently wrong too and spoke with authority on subjects in hindsight they were frankly ill equipped to teach. Part of learning is understanding how to reason through these types of issues. It's a common problem solving problem in the work place just the same.
Hallucinations aren't going anywhere. So you're having a conversation with a stochastic parrot that occasionally says something completely wrong but completely viable and in a highly compelling fashion.
The net outcome there is going to be highly negative.
> The net outcome there is going to be highly negative.
Agreed. With the way LLMs often are quite artuculate and confident sounding, it's only a matter of time until kids will be suspicious of actual people that are articulate and confident from putting effort into improving their speech and speaking about things they are right to be confident about due to being proficient in the subject.
Either that or kids will see that LLMs aren't "getting punished" for being "convincing liars" and will grow up convincing the socially correct way to interact with others is by speaking to them respectfully while going all in on long-game gaslighting.