Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

ello.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 460 posts

Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

#361

Post by jplusequalt »

metalspot wrote: post #316
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading books does not have the psychological effects of passing cognition to an LLM. EDIT: A "luddite" is opposed to new technology. I'm a coder and technical educator. I teach people to use LLMs. Responsible use of a new technology is not being a luddite. And there are equivalent concerns of the effects of social media on children as well.

literacy causes profound brain structure changes and psychological effects, and mass literacy results in profound social transformation. which is why people have be trying to prevent the spread of literacy for thousands of years, to this very day. an LLM is a next token prediction function. of course it matters how you use it, and if you want to use it for an educational purpose, that has to be intentional, so i agre…

>the solution here is not to say the technology is bad but to use it to create competitive products that are actually beneficial.

In the context of educating 5 year olds, I would firmly argue that the solution involves exactly zero use of LLMs.

Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

#362

Post by bluefirebrand »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #351
bluefirebrand wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI tutoring for children is easier We shouldn't do questionable shit just because it's easier

We should do it because of the huge benefits to society. The fact that it is easier than doing something with marginal benefit is why we should do it first.

You have to demonstrate benefits to society before claiming you are providing them

Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

#363

Post by metalspot »

uoaei wrote: post #359
metalspot wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"broad anecdotal consensus" very scientific. i don't disagree, but is it better than youtube? tiktok? instagram? (cocaine? meth? fentanyl?)

Multiple things can be bad for different qualitative reasons.

I don't disagree but something less bad is better than something more bad if those are the only two options. I only said Duolingo was better than Youtube. Duolingo is nuts. I get my children's spam from them and it is this crazy emotionally abusive manipulative therapy talk nonsense trying to get them to use the app. I hope they are using AI to write that. LOL. I can't imagine the actual human who would do that for a job.

Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

#364

Post by [deleted] »

TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #201

I think teaching a child to trust an LLM from a formative age is horrifically irresponsible. If anything, an app should be made where a child learns to correct an LLM's mistakes and learn that it isn't trustworthy. Actually, better, don't put an LLM in front of children. At all. EDIT: If a use case is for children who can't afford good education, then use an LLM to make educational materials for children, review them…

[deleted]

Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

#365

Post by doublerabbit »

Jtarii wrote: post #190
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #166

I'm torn about this. I primarily think that a a kid who won't pick books is a failure of the family of not noticing their interests. When i noticed my oldest 3 yr old was obsessed about cars, i bought him a car encyclopedia. He probably could not read most words or did not understand them. But pretty soon he was telling me about car models that i did not even recognize myself. And as i saw interests, i kept feeding t…

Children are a lot less fragile than parents think they are.

It's not fragility. Children are very adaptive and keen learners. Leading them to be easily conditioned and flipped.

Naivety is a learning mechanism which is part of human psychology and sociology of living. Where if the wrong conditions are brought to the child at a young age; it won't affect them in their now. The repercussions from the negative conditioning does surface later yet having a detrimental effect later on in their life.

I walk home from work and see toddlers with tablets, a digital nanny while the parents push the stroller as they tap on their own phone themselves. It's unlikely they know what content they're watching.

That is however the prime time where they should be interacting with their child. The child is observing everything around them and you should be engaging there observations.

The current and upcoming generations that grew up with a device in hands are now are discovering that they have range of issues from anxiety, trauma, even disassociation. Attention spans are at a whole new low and AI is exploiting that.

We have no idea nor studies how AI will affect children and if we are already starting to see that constant exposure on mature adults causes "Ai psychosis". How will it be any better for children?

It's not necessarily wrong and could be seen as exciting in many ways. It could reach the child in ways that traditional education does not because teaching is subjective. Some children are academic, some are practical, some are both.

With the unmediated push of current AI, Tablets with AI and negative environmental values; it is going to be horrifically damaging for the child later on in life.

All it takes is a toddler to press a button that spawns Ai to peddle misinformation via enhanced subliminal visuals and sounds as evidenced by current younger generations.

It's no fault of their own and you could argue that all devices have the same effect however the earlier were more tightly mediated for which you could turn off.

Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

#368

Post by Cycl0ps »

jplusequalt wrote: post #360
clarle wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a Socratic Method-style AI tutor would work, though. It would be less about the LLM providing direct educational material themselves, but making sure the student is thinking about the right questions to direct themselves in learning the material.

How do you ensure the kid is learning the right material? You want them to stay on topic, but a Socratic Method that starts off on one topic can easily branch into many other topics, and then suddenly your student has spent the whole class learning about something other than what they were supposed to. All learning is good, yes. But a baseline curriculum is necessary to create a ground floor of knowledge for society.

For a current-day LLM, deviation could be measured as the number of tokens since the agent touched on the prompted topic. A specific > token could even be trained so that a harness or other tooling could direct the LLM back towards the prompted topic if needed.

Or something roughly like that. Generally speaking the goal would be for the LLM to bring the topic back on its own while incorporating the tangent, but a hardcoded, "Let's get back on track" button would probably be needed

Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

#369

Post by TonyAlicea10 »

senordevnyc wrote: post #327
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point is that the hallucination rate of modern LLMs, while not zero, is so low that this is no longer an issue in practice. That's just not true. Talk to an LLM about a subject you know deeply. They make up things all the time.

With stuff that a 4-9 year old is going to be learning? Color me skeptical.

You’re applying human cognition expectations to an LLM. Just because the topic is simple to a human doesn’t mean it improves the likelihood the LLM will behave better. It’s all inference to the machine.

Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

#370

Post by windexh8er »

IshKebab wrote: post #216
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #201

I think teaching a child to trust an LLM from a formative age is horrifically irresponsible. If anything, an app should be made where a child learns to correct an LLM's mistakes and learn that it isn't trustworthy. Actually, better, don't put an LLM in front of children. At all. EDIT: If a use case is for children who can't afford good education, then use an LLM to make educational materials for children, review them…

I don't think it's quite as simple as that. LLMs do make mistakes but generally with slightly obscure difficult stuff. They're not going to struggle at all with things a 4-9 year old is learning. Also it's not like teachers never make confident mistakes.

This is wildly dangerous comment and I'm glad to see it downvoted.

I have 2 kids. Both of them went through early grades during COVID. The change in learning and dislike of school was immense during that time-frame. My eldest missed out on the most and it's very clear that their age and time with which they should have been in-class and in-person impacted them.

Not only the screen-time aspect of this ignorance, but the sheer inconsiderate approach to what a model even is. It's not a human, it can't cope or understand a child's current state of being. And if you think it can then stay away from K12 tech, please.

Teachers make mistakes, yes. But can you swap a teacher with another teacher without a student knowing? No. You can with a model and that is dangerous. And not only the company. If Ello wants to they can move students to a Chinese model and nobody would know the difference. Or the OAI model they've chosen can be diluted or changed without Ello even knowing.

Kids deserve better. I truly hope Ello fails in its mission because companies shoving models into K12 are truly going to be the stain we all have to deal with decades from now. I am beyond grateful that my kids learned reading the "old fashioned" way and it speaks volumes that both of them read constantly. Their peers and friend's kids who are addicted to YouTube, TikTok and other socials struggle reading. It's so very obvious to anyone who has kids at this age these days and I think a lot of parents are now realizing their mistakes and are often times embarrassed when they see these kids side-by-side in public displays of their work.

I keep seeing this over and over. I am on a parent technology group at my kids school and it is a monumental effort to keep these "technology directors" in check. They are some of the easiest to sell to given they go into conversations with companies like Ello with nothing but trust. They don't consider data, privacy and security of these students or very rarely. They often don't understand relationships with respect to technology and the areas where issues can surface or be present.

I hate everything about this blog post and, again, I truly hope Ello fails before they contribute to the continued degradation of these kids early lives.

Post reply on HN