We’re going to disagree about the quality of LLM learning experiences.
As an educator I’ve used them a lot for myself and in teaching others. Good for one-off topics if you check facts and a lot of human educators have built good quality content that it rips off.
LLMs are rather terrible at an extended progressive curriculum.
That said, the core thesis was simple: it’s dangerous to teach children to trust LLMs.
Not what they are. That they’re right. Which they aren’t. A lot.
You said you largely agreed with that. So, what’s the approach within this service to mitigate that?
I appreciate you responding but you’re throwing a lot of “but X” when the question is “what about Y”.
> We actually work hard to make sure a child knows they aren't talking to something real - that they're talking to a computer program.
The problem is not talking to a computer program. Kids have been using computers in school long before LLMs.
The problem is teaching a child to trust what the non-deterministic system is guessing at them. That will carry forward in their life.
You’re teaching them that an LLM is right, not just what it is.
As an aside, I’m also not sure about the certainty of what “making sure” a 4-year old knows is real or not is.
> If your kid gets everything they need from their school, their home, their private tutor and so on, then great.
That’s a powerful emotional point made to shut down criticism. Except it has nothing to do with putting a kid in front of LLMs.
I expressly mentioned this in my comment. You could create a mountain of educational material, apps, and tools with LLM assistance and verify it. Same result.
I'm not sure how common sense says that LLMs will hallucinate less on topics for children. That's not how they work.
And no, LLMs are not perfect. They're non-deterministic.
And no, even if they were perfect my statement was that it is irresponsible to teach a child to trust an LLM. Even if it was perfect on these topics, as they move forward in education that trust would later fail them.
That is a problem both ideologically and pragmatically. You have to think long-term.
On a side note: ask an LLM to write a story at a 4-9 year old level. Work with it for awhile doing iterations and it will hallucinate a previous detail or change a character name as context rots. Lots of other examples of "basic" topics that still produce hallucinations.
Current version now requires you to go through all 18 words to finish. Takes way too long, less intense, less interesting. You can't just listen to people's opinions, because they're sayings without actually knowing if it improves the game because you have to test it.
A shame, I wouldn't want to play any more in this state. Not as compelling.
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.
> Anyway no learning is needed for 4-9 year old education.
This is an extraordinarily naive statement. Learning how to teach well takes a lifelong commitment. A topic being basic for an adult does not mean it is easier to teach to a child. In many ways it makes it harder.
No, it's not. The claim that "teacher's make mistakes too" suggests that AI is equivalent to a human teacher in value. I posit other ways in which a human teacher is potentially more valuable.
Also, teachers who love their students tend to want to educate them well.
> lol no. Have you ever tried correcting a teacher?
Do you mean as a student? If so, that's a different dynamic. Because teachers certainly have accountability processes in many institutions.
It's a classic example of the kinds of questions LLMs get wrong. There's plenty of others. Not sure your point here. We can easily find things a 4-9 year old will talk about that an LLM will get wrong, hallucinate, etc.
> a child tutored by a good quality state-of-the-art LLM with a good teaching-focused harness could have better learning outcomes than a child without it.
There's a lot of work being done in 'could'. And it's entirely ignoring the dangers.
I'm not saying "no LLMs in education". I'm a technical educator and I give students LLM prompts and agent skills that I've built to help them learn.
This isn't that. We're talking about giving an LLM to a 4-9 year old and saying "this is your teacher".
> They're not going to struggle at all with things a 4-9 year old is learning.
Ask them how many r's are in strawberry.
> Also it's not like teachers never make confident mistakes.
That's an extraordinary false equivalency that is popular around here. Teachers don't make confident mistakes because the student asked the wrong way. Teachers can be held accountable. Teachers can learn. Teachers can love their students.
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, and make them available for free. After all, the contents are ripped off from human educators anyway.
“The most surprising part? It all happened within weeks and lasted for months.”
That’s an AI tell. It may not be entirely LLM-generated, the various direct quotations help a lot, but there are touches that definitely feel like an LLM had a hand here.
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