Also it's not like teachers never make confident mistakes.
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.
2024 called and wants its talking points back.
> 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.
All of these can be true, and at the same it can be true that 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. Even if we agreed that a good human teacher is better than a LLM, human teacher's time and attention is limited.
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".
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.
> There's a lot of work being done in 'could'. And it's entirely ignoring the dangers.
I agree that there are some risks. But for many children, the alternative is not human teacher, but no teacher at all. This considerably changes the risk-benefit calculus, IMHO.
That's just not true. Talk to an LLM about a subject you know deeply. They make up things all the time.
What are you applying? Would you even admit LLMs are useful for this if they’re perfect at topics that kids would be learning? Or are your objections actually ideological rather than pragmatic?
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.
You’re welcome to your views, but they don’t make a lot of sense, or fit with reality. Continue angrily tilting against windmills I guess.
But now you’re saying the common sense is that they will hallucinate.
Let’s try again: your claim is that LLMs “make up stuff all the time”, so they can’t be used to educate children.
I’m saying that modern SOTA models do not make up stuff all the time as it pertains to the topics a child of 4-9 would learn. That doesn’t mean they’re perfect or will never make mistakes, but there’s zero reason to think such issues would be widespread. And common sense would tell you that perfection is not required for LLMS to be a net positive in education.
I’m sure you’ll have another vapid rejoinder, but this has been boring for awhile and you seem to be enjoying being obtuse, so I’m moving on.
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Do you actually use these things?
I use them every day for SWE. I cannot remember any hallucination from the last 6 months. It pretty much stopped being an issue from the beginning of this year, if you use top paid models. Free models or lower-tier paid models can still hallucinate, though.
Their output is just.... not very good. For example, it may not fail tests, but it does so for wrong reasons and will fail under different conditions. Or it checks or guards for things in trivially redundant ways, like doing something like `if (x > 5 && x > 3)` that betray its lack of "knowing" what it's doing. And I can't even get answers from them anymore because they just feed anything I say into the LLM and copy/paste the response.
I'm basically being forced to code with LLMs via review through a person proxy. Or maybe they just have it hooked up to read it directly. It's maddening. It's like having a realistic enough chatbot just shuts people's brains off.
Every single time I have asked Claude or another "top tier" offering a detailed question about something I'm an expert in, there's something wrong in the answer. Usually many things.
Do you actually look at what comes out?
if my aunt had wheels, she'd be a bicycle.
I'm not participating in the debate, but fyi I have just asked haiku, sonnet, opus and fable that question and they all got it right. Tried with the letter s in portuguese word "sussuarana" (mountain lion) too - same thing.
> Teachers don't make confident mistakes because the student asked the wrong way.
I don't see why the mechanism of being wrong matters. If anything it's worse when teachers are reliably wrong independently of how you ask the question.
> Teachers can be held accountable.
lol no. Have you ever tried correcting a teacher?
> Teachers can learn.
Good teachers can learn. The ones that make confident mistakes don't. Anyway no learning is needed for 4-9 year old education.
> Teachers can love their students.
That's just such a weird point to make. It is great that my kids' primary school teachers are super kind and loving. But it's not what they're for, and it's definitely not what AI tutors are for. Nobody is claiming this will replace a hug from a parent.
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.
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 booking learning is needed for 4-9 year old's. But learning patience, understanding, empathy are life long pursuits.
> That's just such a weird point to make. It is great that my kids' primary school teachers are super kind and loving. But it's not what they're for, and it's definitely not what AI tutors are for. Nobody is claiming this will replace a hug from a parent.
This doesn't seem weird at all. Developmentally they need (kind, loving) human interaction. That's obviously not the only purpose of teachers, but if you think 7 hours a day without it wouldn't make a difference... just like a computer can't be held accountable, a computer can't have compassion.
Man, way to decide that the entire field of child pedagogy is just trash. I wonder what all of those people were researching all these years?
Children ask some incredibly deep questions, I would not sell them short.
Say what you will about the biases of teachers, but I'll take them any day over the propaganda [1] some foreign megacorporation has inculcated into its AI.
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.
Sounds like this issue could be solved by an open-source teaching harness.
vs "you like dinosaurs! me too!” From the blog post.
In a world of AI everywhere, off-line social interaction will be the major currency. We're all going to crave people... and each other.... The kids who grow up with social skills will be the most successful.
AI is vastly better than exposing children to the trash of popular media, the open internet, and apps. if you go completely no screens, that is one thing (with its own significant trade offs), but if you are going to let your children use any technology, AI is a massive leap forward in providing safe and educational digital experience.
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.
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 agree with you on that.
chatgpt and all the other ai powered scams and attention monetization apps are horrible, because they are just using improved technology to accelerate the exploitation of consumers (both adults and children) of media and app platforms.
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.
Can you point to any serious studies that sustain that claim? If anything that sounds like a gamifying learning experience, letting children become expert beginners.
But on a personal level I would vastly prefer my children use even a crappy AI chat app like Deepseek than watch Youtube. If you have young children and pay attention it would be almost impossible to come to a different conclusion.
All learning is good, yes. But a baseline curriculum is necessary to create a ground floor of knowledge for society.
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
Very true! An adult might hit that button. 4-9 year olds I think are less likely to.
I don't think kids, of any age, should be in front of LLMs unless by complete agreement of their parents and only after their parents are made very aware of how this technology came to be, how it can be used and how it cannot be guaranteed to be safe. Ello leading with that is disingenuous from the start and that should tell parents all they need to know up front.
My kids read hundreds of books a year. They love reading, we read with them every single day as they learned. They learned to read the right way and that doesn't involve a screen.
Keep kids out of this garbage.
Example of page we generate (average "book" has 4-8 pages like this): https://ibb.co/Ld9mp10v
She loves it, she is engaged into it, this is from an LLM, I don't see the problem with it, I also don't see how it's a problem to generate LLM-made written stories as well, they can be great, personalized and better in many scenarios than random books. I will definitely build learning materials entirely made by AI as well.
Now regarding this project, I feel it's indeed quite dangerous, but I feel as a complementary learning thing, it could be great, for example post-school, 30min of this daily to consolidate learning might be beneficial, I will do so at quite a young age, but with my own softwares & devices of course, not that.
PS: Those animals are from her collection of plush toys which I've individually put as a Sprite for AI usage, I got about 50 plush toys (1 a week in average), mostly used to benchmark her to see if she can recognize the animals from the books she is reading, and she does, all of them, it's a very useful purchase.
-> I think teaching a child to trust an LLM from a formative age is horrifically irresponsible.
I largely agree, although with some nuance. One of the most important skills a young child today is going to need as they grow up is the ability to understand what's AI and what isn't, and how to interact with things that are. 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.
If part of the comment was on the accuracy of LLMs; our system of multiple harnessed LLMs running in parallel does deliver pedagogically solid and accurate content and experiences. There's a few comments in this thread about LLM hallucinations - We have curriculum specialists constantly evaluating the interactions that Ello delivers, and it just isn't a major factor right now.
So we need to ensure that we're delivering a high-quality, accurate experience for a child, while at the same time making sure that they understand what's reality.
-> Actually, better, don't put an LLM in front of children. At all.
I've responded above to your reason against using AI in education. But to judge whether it's right to avoid using AI with children entirely, we also need to weigh the positive side. So many children get a substandard education that isn't responsive to them and doesn't set them up for success - whether that's a child stuck in a class of 30 being treated as average, or one of the 270 million kids who don't have access to any education at all. Saying "don't put an LLM in front of children" misses the reality of what education actually looks like for so many of them IMO. If your kid gets everything they need from their school, their home, their private tutor and so on, then great.
So our answer is to use the benefits of AI to build technology that teaches - that understands where a child is and gives them the next learning experience they need to keep growing - while making sure they understand they're dealing with a computer program, and without trying to replace the critical role of the people in their lives.
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.
-> That’s a powerful emotional point made to shut down criticism. You made a blanket statement - without any substantive points - that we shouldn't put LLMs in front of kids. I was arguing that there are advantages that we should take into account, not trying to shut down criticism.
-> not sure about the certainty of what “making sure” a 4-year old knows is real or not is. I agree. We're being very cautious here. My co-founder, who is a clinical child psychologist, has a blog post on exactly this you can find it in the footer of our website.)
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”.
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.