Ask HN: Give 8 year old access to Chat GPT?

I've found ChatGPT to be quite safe (the children don't know how to produce an unsafe input, and OpenAI's guardrails are pretty high).

In the same vein, I encounter this issue with Midjourney. My nine-year-old enjoys using Midjourney to create images, but I'm concerned about her ability to chat with strangers on Discord.

Giving children free access to the Internet is already a risky proposal that can easily lead to them finding inappropriate content. Content creators push toxic belief systems, narratives, marketing strategies to sell even things they don't believe in. In other words, the Internet is actively trying to harm you for profit and it's on the user to avoid it. I still think the benefits outweigh the good - mainly access to information, communities and entertainment.

The AI on the other hand is designed to avoid hurting people's feelings even though it often fails or gives incorrect answers, it's damage is not seeking you out. I don't have children but if I did I want to believe that I would either not give them any technology or give them all of it and try to show the importance of critical thinking on the side (though they may do it naturally without your help, only one way to find out).

Great question by the way.

Personally I would vote "no" regardless of whether I had confidence the kid wouldn't be exposed to the dregs of the Internet, for two reasons:

1. LLMs are I think pretty inarguably bad at answering certain types of questions in a factually accurate way, at least without nontrivial prompt engineering. I don't think many 8 year-olds will recognize which types of questions the LLM will give inaccurate answers to, or be ready for the sort of prompt engineering that'd be required to mitigate this.

2. Learning is of course more than simply obtaining and memorizing facts. You don't want to overfit your kid - you want them to have to struggle a bit for their understanding so that it generalizes. Sure, formulating questions is part of that process, but there's something to be said for having to sift through pages of search results (or even better, from a learning standpoint, searching through the pages of a book they had to find on a library or bookstore shelf). It's like the old idiom, give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime. Better to teach your kid to fish (and for knowledge/understanding, not mere facts).

As for image generation, I suspect you'd find more inappropriate content come up there than with a chatbot - and teaching the kid to draw, paint, etc would probably be better for their development.

I played around with my kid with supervision, and had her alone with ... midjourney, I think? Million weird dragons ensued.

I probably wouldn't give her access to chatgpt, but more for dislike of my kid's chats being stored with a corporation that will use it for something. That is the reason kid's email is protonmail and calendar is in nextcloud.

I would consider setting up https://ollama.ai/ ? You can run it locally and because it is smaller not as smart as state-of-art LLMs, it could train them better to be wary of the more advanced version.

Yeah. Safer than roblox, youtube, basically most of the "kid stuff". At some point, you have to expose them to pointy things, and 8 is a decent age.

Yes. It fits with a curious child. Adding a custom prompt... I am an 8 year old before each request would give age related answers.

This is something @Asa Miller and I are building: apps for kids under 12 that unlock access to the wonder and power of the web in a fun / safe way.

We’ve started with social messaging for kids under 12, that includes a kid friendly GPT bot they can interact with... Genie.

DM me for early beta access.

Beta site: https://beta.genie.gg

How do I put this?

Assuming that a given LLM was trained on N percent of the Internet, then exposing your kid to that LLM is, given sufficient time and API spend, exposing them to everything in that N percent.

So, I leave it to you to determine how comfortable you are allowing your child to more or less freely experience N percent of the Internet.

IMO It's pretty locked down. Far more than general web usage. I frequently run into limits accidentally (and annoyingly) in ways I would not expect (something saying it would generate unsafe content, etc).

So as things go, its pretty tame, and way better than unsupervised social media or Google access.

Super hard question. I think it's a bit too early to put these models in hands of kids unsupervised.

Yes! My 4 year old made me a bracelet that says chatGPT. He likes to use it to make pictures in voice mode. UI needs improvement but he likes it. My 14 year old is on it all the time and his hacking skills improved enormously.

I would.

Keep logs, review anything that needs attention. Don't keep it a secret. Make sure they view it as a tool.

I would be so much farther ahead if I had chatGPT to answer all my questions at 8 years old. I had books, at least.

Just an idea, but this might be a case where a custom system prompt/GPT is warranted.

Then again, could also backfire or negatively impact output quality.

I would say yes, depending on the child. Monitored of course.