JA WestenbergNo, You Shouldn't Let Your Kids Use ChatGPT. A thread. 🧵
1/16
We pretend that because the interface is clean and there’s no nicotine, no violence, no nudity, that it’s safe. It looks like a homework helper. A science fair assistant. A miracle of modern education.
That’s just marketing.
2/16
You wouldn’t let your child hang out unsupervised with a stranger - especially one who lies confidently, speaks with artificial authority, and occasionally invents facts.
3/16
But that’s what we’re doing when we let them talk to generative AI with no guardrails and no context. It looks smart. It feels friendly. It sounds right. That’s exactly what makes it dangerous.
4/16
We underestimate how deeply plastic the young mind is.
Kids don’t use tools; they internalize them.
5/16
Kids learn how to think by watching thinking happen. When you train on a language model, it doesn’t learn truth, it learns patterns. When a kid trains on a language model, the same thing happens. They start seeing speech as performance.
6/16
They start believing fluency equals wisdom. They mimic the mimicry.
7/16
Fiona@Daojoan Unfortunately "believing fluency equals wisdom" is already well-entrenched in adults, too. That's essentially why LLMs are catching on.
Where I disagree is calling them "powerful", they're worse than useless, unless what you actually want is "making up stuff that sounds plausible at the surface", a propaganda amplifier, if you will.
Where I disagree is calling them "powerful", they're worse than useless, unless what you actually want is "making up stuff that sounds plausible at the surface", a propaganda amplifier, if you will.