For fun? It’s probably fine. As a substitute for human interaction and learning? No, no one should use chatgpt that way

I agree with those saying you can’t/shouldn’t forbid it. As someone in computer science, the important thing to me is to make sure they understand what those LLMs are and aren’t. Specifically, the ‘M’ in “LLM” is for “model” - they’re a detailed model of what a conversation should look like, especially what a response to a question should look like. But looking right is different from being correct. You can ask one for a mathematical proof and it will give you one that looks right, but it probably won’t be.

The other thing I’d try to get them to understand is that the leaning part of school is much more important than the grade part, especially if they’re going to go on to college. They could use an LLM to help them create a term paper, but if they didn’t learn anything it’s going to catch up to them and cause problems down the road.

I’ll be honest, if I got it at 16, I would fuck around with it for a few weeks and then get bored

ChatGPT is overly safe in terms of personality and the worldview it presents when asked. it’s a great tool to learn, more so than a teacher because you can freely ask it very specific questions in your own words and it will give an understandable answer. I think it’s actually a perfect tool for someone that age. Once the topics get too advanced, the results become less reliable though.

It doesnt make things up anymore as much as it used to. It still does sometimes with topics that are less commonly discussed in the dataset it’s trained on (this is similar with websearch). It will however confidently claim that it’s answer is correct sometimes. As long as you understand that it’s not always correct and have the sense to verify things that seem off, you’ll be fine.

You’ll get the best results from the paid GPT4 subscription (20 dollars a month), which i would recommend.

The only real risk i see is overreliance on it. I notice this in myself too, it’s almost like i forgot googling things is an option, so when i’m stuck rather than trying another approaxh, i just keep throwing prompts at GPT-4 until i give up and find the solution elsewhere, often within minutes. The way things are going, classic web search is becoming obsolete (unreliable result because of AI written content and fake news) while AI actively tries to be unbiased.

tldr: Yes, it’s extremely useful, make sure they don’t forget how to do things without chatgpt too.

Treat it like a calculator that has a 75% chance of giving the wrong answer.

To use as a tool? Yes.
To use as a friend? No.

A person using a tool for a longer time will become better in using said tool.

I don’t think there will be any change in personality or cognition just by using ChatGPT. The only concern I can think of is over reliance. Especially if your child intends to goto post secondary school. Universities are very strict regarding plagiarism and view AI generation as such. If they can use it responsibly there no downside, if they’re going to use it to start to do their homework for them it’ll be a problem.