Lately, there has been quite a lot of chatter over this ChatGPT but what is it, and how might it affect your little one? I gave it a go and found it to be surprisingly powerful!
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that you can chat with. It is created by Open AI, which is an AI research startup organisation that has created various open source AI projects for public use. According to their website, the mission is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
ChatGPT uses what is called a GPT3 and GPT3.5 language model tool that taps on machine learning to respond to user inputs. The chatbot determines what to reply based on a large corpus of text that it trains upon. The way it responds does actually sound pretty impressive, and one interesting feature is that it can remember what you typed previously and respond accordingly.
How to use ChatGPT
First, head to this link https://chat.openai.com/. You will need to sign up with an email account, or continue with Google or Microsoft Account. Then you will be presented with the initial graphical interface to start typing what you want.
For example, we can ask some questions like “Why is the sky blue”.
The explanation may sound quite difficult for a kid, but it is possible to ask ChatGPT to explain it in more simple terms for younger kids.
Experience using this with kids
I tried using ChatGPT with my kids, and asked them what question they wanted to ask ChatGPT. They came up with very simple questions like arithmetic calculations which as expected ChatGPT was able to solve very easily. The kids naturally said that they could use ChatGPT to help solve their homework problems. And this is probably going to be a problem in future if kids have access to such chatbots.
Some other uses of ChatGPT is that it is able to generate a story. For example you can ask ChatGPT to say a story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears but with other animals, perhaps Three Rabbits instead.
You can also ask ChatGPT to generate a story based on a series of characters that your kid wants in that story, and customise it along the way.
Other interesting ways for kids to use ChatGPT
1. Play a text video game.
First saw this on Metaverse Post, where an 11-year-old boy came up with a ChatGPT text-based game.
I have tried creating a new game based on the famous 食字路口 Taiwanese show that I watched long time ago.
This is amazing because it understood the rules of a new game immediately and can also understand Chinese.
2. Ask questions.
You can ask ChatGPT to set questions like Math.
Or create a series of trivia to test your kid’s general knowledge.
3. Plan activities.
You can also use this to plan an itinerary or activity with kids.
You can use it to create itinerary for travel in other countries as well!
Final thoughts
Obviously such chatbots are going to be improved in future (GPT-4 is coming soon). While they cannot completely replace Google or other question and answer type of tools like Stackoverflow right now as it does make certain factual mistakes at times, one day, they might be good enough. This will revolutionalise how we work in future, what jobs are created, and what jobs will cease to exist.
It will be interesting to see how the future of chatbots and AI will be. And we need to keep up with the news, so that we can prepare our kids for an AI dominant world. If you are interested, you can read my previous post on coding for kids to prepare them for such a future.
Cafe hopping with kids - Hot Tomato Jewel