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
We don’t give a five-year-old a credit card and say, “Good luck budgeting.” We don’t drop a 10-year-old into Times Square at midnight and call it a field trip.
8/16
We create buffers. We wait until they’ve got context, maturity, the ability to weigh signal from noise.
And even then, we supervise.
9/16
ChatGPT etc are powerful - and fundamentally misaligned with how kids learn to trust, reason, and discern.
10/16
These models shape the questions you ask next. They don’t reflect your thinking. They nudge it. Relentlessly.
11/16
I'm not trying to create a panic. This is a boundary. If you wouldn’t let your kid join Twitter, if you wouldn’t let them Google health symptoms unsupervised, don’t let them outsource cognition to a system you don’t understand.
12/16
Curiosity needs friction. Learning needs surprise. Wisdom needs mistakes. Models don’t offer that. They offer something faster, smoother, and emptier.
13/16
We can teach kids to use these tools with judgment, with context, with skepticism. But that starts with a pause. With an adult in the room. With a conversation about what these models are and what they’re not. It starts with treating intelligence as more than output.
14/16
Once you flatten knowledge into prediction, once you replace the actual road of learning with a shortcut that feels smarter than you are, you’ve done more harm than you know.
15/16
You’ve reshaped the map your kid is using to navigate the world.
You’ve said: here’s something that sounds like thinking.
Something easier than thinking.
Good luck un-ringing that bell.
16/16
Erik Jonker@Daojoan great thread, additional complexity, it's not about "ChatGPT" only anymore, the technology is integrated in Google Search and many other applications, visible or less visible. If we want to limit kids, limit screentime is the only way i guess but how realistic is that with current smartphone use...also national government and EU are slow or not regulating enough, a hard time to raise kids (mine are 18+ so i just coach them with regard to AI they use regularly by the way...)
Cassandrich@ErikJonker @Daojoan As always, the kids are the savvy ones who know this shit is cringe garbage. It's the adults who are a threat. But adults want to take away kids' access to friendships and information as punishment for adults being awful... 🙄 🤬
Serg Metelin@dalias @ErikJonker @Daojoan I wish kids would be that self-aware, but sadly that's not what happened to kids of 2010s when iPhones with selfie cameras and Instagram came out... Broken generation of kids :(
@serg @ErikJonker @Daojoan "Broken generations of kids" is something only members of broken generations of olds would say or even think.
@dalias @ErikJonker @Daojoan I wish you were right, but that's not what the data shows. Check out https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/0ae97ada-0a45-478a-a11a-ec8d01d688d7 and maybe it will change your mind.
To draw a parallel - do you think it's ok to market and sell cigarettes to kids? Do they have enough insight to know that it's cringe?
@serg @ErikJonker @Daojoan No, that kind of propaganda will not change my mind.
This generation is anxious because the olds gave them a fundamentally fucked up world and hoarded the resources they'd need to survive it. Not because they had access to information to learn about how fucked up it is.
@serg @ErikJonker @Daojoan Regarding stuff that's actually harmful, like Facebook or AI, repeatedly the perverse "think of the children" response is to ban children from participating in life, rather than to ban the harmful thing, so that abusers can keep exploiting adults.
Ban it for everyone.
@dalias @ErikJonker @Daojoan gotcha, makes sense. I actually wonder if a total ban of attention economy and addictive engagement strategies would make our society waaaaay healthier. I find it very sad that adults try to hack kids habits in their formative years as they think if they hook them now - they hook them for life. That's the shitty part.
@serg @ErikJonker @Daojoan Ban adtech and tracking and regulate paid speech and that shit would cease to exist on its own.
@dalias @ErikJonker @Daojoan If you have any ideas on how to promote/support an initiative like that - lmk!