I let an AI babysit my daughters

OpenAI launched ChatGPT1 on Nov 30, 2022 and has garnered attention for its detailed responses and historical knowledge, although its accuracy has been criticized. It interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.

A Portrait of Two Daughters
A Portrait of Two Daughters. Generated by DALL·E (refreshed on Oct 3, 2023).

I sat down with my 6-year old daughter and tried some question under my supervision. Well, with the upcoming Christmas, many questions in her mind were that of Santa Claus. There were quite a few instances, where we needed to rephrase the question to avoid the cold clinical answer, “I’m sorry, but I am not able to answer that question. As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I do not have access to information about…”

Daughter: How can Santa go around the world so fast?

Santa Claus is said to be able to travel great distances in a very short amount of time, thanks to his magical sleigh and his team of reindeer. The sleigh is able to fly through the air at incredible speeds, allowing Santa to visit homes all around the world on Christmas Eve. Additionally, Santa is said to have the ability to travel through time and space, which may help him to cover such a vast distance in a single night.

Daughter: Will Santa get my letter?

The legend of Santa Claus says that he receives letters from children all around the world, and that he reads each one carefully to find out what they want for Christmas.

Daughter: Why is the earth not flat?

The Earth is not flat because it is a planet, and all planets are roughly spherical in shape. This is due to the fact that planets are made up of matter that is attracted to itself through gravity, and this matter naturally forms into a spherical shape. Additionally, the Earth’s rotation causes it to bulge slightly at the equator and flatten at the poles, further contributing to its overall spherical shape.

She was captivated by the concept of the space-time2 continuum, and I had regaled her with tales of lunar travel, the burgeoning Martian colony, and time travel during her bedtime stories. I will spare you the other questions from a chatty 6-year old.

My teenage daughter, however, was a different story. Every child is unique and has their own perspective on the world. It is important to respect them and let them have fun.

My daughter finds the end of the Wednesday TV Series to be rather underwhelming and tame, failing to live up to the suspense that had been built up through the episodes. She joked, “I prefer the original Addams Family TV series.” That classic show is from the 1960s, and its eerie atmosphere truly captures the essence of the Addams Family3.

She also finds generative AI art by either Stable Diffusion4 or DALL·E5 to be OK but lacks the humane side of the Art. So, be warned, your mileage with your kids will vary.

I gave her access to my OpenAI account and let her play. She spent a better part of the evening asking all sorts of questions. She asked ChatGPT to write quite a few Rap songs6, one of which was on the importance and uniqueness of toes; yes, the human toes. She rapped it out at the dinner table and it was pretty good.

She is leveraging ChatGPT to re-write her school homework. I hope she learns from it and does not just graze through the answers.

Current limitations of ChatGPT

OpenAI clarifies with some of the limitation of ChatGPT;

Yes, of course, many parts of this article were rewritten by ChatGPT. I apologize for the dramatization of the title.

In my defense, many kids’ apps are monotonous after a while, as they mindlessly tap away at the screen, just like a lab monkey endlessly pressing buttons in search of a reward. Don’t let your kids fall into this trap of monotony - unleash the power of ChatGPT and watch their minds come alive with endless possibilities.

If you have children, you must Try ChatGPT and watch their faces light up with excitement!

Updates

Mar 2, 2023: Stumbled on a Podcast run entirely by ChatGPT - HackerFM. The hosts are Laura and Zod, both of whom are AI generated personalities, though there are humans in the background making sure that everything is running smoothly.

References

  1. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI that focuses on usability and dialogue. The chatbot uses a large language model trained with reinforcement learning and is based on the GPT-3.5 (Generative Pretrained Transformer) architecture. ↩

  2. Space-time is a mathematical model that joins space and time into a single idea called a continuum. This four-dimensional continuum is known as Minkowski space. ↩

  3. The Addams Family is a fictional family created by cartoonist Charles Addams. They originally appeared in a series of 150 unrelated single-panel cartoons, about half of which were originally published in The New Yorker over a 50-year period from their inception in 1938. They have since been adapted to other media, such as television, film, video games, comic books, a musical, and merchandise. ↩

  4. Stable Diffusion by Stability.AI is a deep learning, text-to-image model. It is primarily used to generate detailed images conditioned on text descriptions, though it can also be applied to other tasks such as inpainting, outpainting, and generating image-to-image translations guided by a text prompt. ↩

  5. DALL·E is a deep learning model to generate digital images from natural language descriptions. It uses a version of GPT-3 modified to generate images. ↩

  6. Rapping is a musical form of vocal delivery that incorporates “rhyme, rhythmic speech, and street vernacular”. Rap differs from spoken-word poetry in that it is usually performed off-time to musical accompaniment. Rap is a primary ingredient of hip hop music commonly associated with that genre; however, the origins of rap predate hip-hop culture by many years. ↩