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

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

#21
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure… and so far there always appears to be a way of breaking that fine tuning; see the the recent paper on training data extraction I linked in another comment below.

There's a big difference between being breakable and being representative of the web content used for training like you claimed earlier.

Again, see the link… get it to repeat the same word and it will give you back its raw training data. We’re still discovering the (potentially limitless) ways these things can be tricked into regurgitating what they were trained on; it’s entirely possible there’s no way to stop them doing so.

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

#23

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…

> LLMs are I think pretty inarguably bad at answering certain types of questions in a factually accurate way I wonder how would LLM compare to average pre-internet adult an 8 year old might have access to. People are also bad at accurately answering questions.

That's what books were for (among other things): they were knowledge prosthetics.

EDIT: And to be clear, yes, books were conveying information from other adults. But 1) the capital requirements of engaging or operating a printing press meant that there was some gatekeeping (for better as well as worse) concerning which adults' views made it into print, and 2) there were things like peer review and other social technologies to increase confidence in the accuracy of the information contained in books, i.e. to make that gatekeeping more than merely economic. LLMs are ingesting the unfiltered thoughts of anyone with internet access, and then noisily producing outputs based on them (with some limited inexpert human fine-tuning at the end).

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

#24
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.

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

#26

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.

> but I'm concerned about her ability to chat with strangers on Discord.

As you should be. For anyone else who might be on the fence about this, take a look at this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJEvA7Plr78

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

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are I think pretty inarguably bad at answering certain types of questions in a factually accurate way I wonder how would LLM compare to average pre-internet adult an 8 year old might have access to. People are also bad at accurately answering questions.

That's what books were for (among other things): they were knowledge prosthetics. EDIT: And to be clear, yes, books were conveying information from other adults. But 1) the capital requirements of engaging or operating a printing press meant that there was some gatekeeping (for better as well as worse) concerning which adults' views made it into print, and 2) there were things like peer review and other social techno…

Not all kids were encouraged to engage with books. I don't think LLMs are a replacement for books. But they might be a decent replacement for fallible human that read some books in the past and vaguely remembers some of them.
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