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 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.

>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.

> AI is a massive leap forward in providing safe and educational digital experience.

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.

Can you point to any serious studies that show the opposite? No. They don't exist. There cannot be any serious studies until there is a generational cohort that can be evaluated for long term impact.

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.

He didn't make the opposite claim. You are the one that made the claim, meaning you have the burden of supporting it. If there are no studies then no credible claim can reasonably made.

How about the broad anecdotal consensus that Duolingo, a gamified language app, famously does not do much if anything to prepare people for conversational fluency.

"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.

The thing is, there are never only two options.