Guiding Children’s Use of ChatGPT

Why Guidance Is Necessary

Tools with a high degree of freedom need guidance. The internet and YouTube, for example, can be misused, so children need support in learning how to use them appropriately. AI chatbots can do many things, but that also makes them difficult to use well.

Change is happening so quickly that public education has not yet been able to cover it adequately. For now, parents need to take on this role. Today’s children are not merely IT natives; they are AI natives. They are exposed to AI from the period when their thinking is still developing, so guidance is needed to ensure that their thinking ability is not hindered.

They will live in a time when AI is used throughout every process. This makes the ability to use AI well an important capability to develop.

Three Key Areas of Guidance

There are three main points to focus on:

• How to give AI effective tasks, or prompting
• How to break work into stages
• How to use AI in ways that promote thinking

1. Giving Effective Instructions

A prompt is the user’s input that leads a language model to produce an answer: in effect, a kind of instruction. To receive the result you want, you need to communicate what you want accurately.

A useful prompt should provide three things: instruction, context, and guidelines.

• Instruction: Explain the task, role, objective, or other work to be performed.
• Context: Provide the information that can be used to carry out the task.
• Guideline: Specify details, output format, and constraints to follow while doing the work.

2. Working in Stages

Even for a simple task, dividing the work into stages creates more opportunities to organize your thoughts and provide input along the way. This gives you better steerability.

For writing, the process might involve gathering material, creating an outline, making the outline more detailed, and then writing the piece.

For project development, it might involve gathering ideas, selecting ideas, comparing the selected ideas, and writing the specific project details.

You can also discuss with an AI chatbot how a task itself might best be divided into stages.

3. Using AI to Promote Thinking

There is a risk that children may depend on AI rather than think for themselves, or accept its output uncritically. Interactive learning is more effective than a one-sided lecture that is not engaging, so questions should be used actively.

Instead of asking, “Give me 10 ideas,” ask, “Ask me 10 questions that will help me come up with ideas.” Instead of asking, “Explain XX,” ask, “Ask me a sequence of questions that will help me learn about XX.”

Another useful activity is to critique AI-generated results. Discuss what is good about a piece of writing (Plus), what could be improved (Minus), and what is interesting (Interesting). You can also compare outputs from two models, such as ChatGPT and Claude, or compare two separate generations.

Additional Considerations

GPT-3.5, the free version, only knows information up to September 2021, so it is not appropriate for asking about current information. GPT-4 with Web Browsing, New Bing Chat, You.com, and Perplexity.ai provide answers based on search results.

Children should be taught that AI chatbots can contain incorrect information, often called hallucination, and can give different answers each time because of randomness. Education about personal information, internet etiquette, and plagiarism should accompany AI education.

Parents should begin by using AI as much as possible in everyday life themselves. Learning through experience and developing an intuitive feel for its use are necessary.