hello and welcome for real this time with sound possibly I am Briar Harvey this is the neurodiversity media Network and this is a special episode of askbriar now if you are new to my world some important facts for you to know going into this is that in the Harvey household we are mostly unschooled and we mostly do not restrict Electronics so we've got some pretty freewheeling ideas about what our kids are allowed to do with their electronics and with their electronic usage that said my husband called me this morning while I was recording my live stream with faith and he said did you try to log into chatgpt with my email address and I said no of course not I have my own chat GPT account I pay for pro why would I need your login and he said well then you had best have a discussion with your son my husband and oldest daughter out of town this week on a work project and so it's just me and 11 and 5 at home right now which is why I'm exhausted and it's like all right great amongst all the other things that I gotta do today now I also have to have a conversation about AI with my 11 year old which was certainly not on my agenda for the day
so I go to talk to 11 and I'm like were you trying to log into chat GPT and he said yeah and I said okay how do you know about chat GPT and he said well I heard about it on YouTube of course he heard it about it on YouTube that's where all knowledge comes from as far as 11 year olds are concerned again because we're pretty radical about the media here for him YouTube is probably half educational content and half video game walkthroughs sometimes those video game walkthroughs include memes from Reddit which I find personally questionable but truly we we supervise our kids Electronic media but I also trust them to come to me and have conversations with me if they're not sure about what they're getting online so I said okay you wanted to play with chat GPT tell me more and he said okay I found this website called you.com which is like chatgpt but didn't require me to have a login and so I'd been playing with it for the last week or so getting it to write stories for me and I'm like okay please help me understand what kind of stories you are telling with chat GPT and he gave me some of the prompts and it was very much alternative history kind of stuff which are some of the videos that he watches on YouTube are what would the world be like if such and such thing did not happen and truly as the parent of a neurodivergent child what I see here is uh exploration it's curiosity it's creativity it's how do I use this new tool to do something different
so I called back my husband and I'm like this is what he's using it for and we had a measured conversation
in which he said I get that and I'm very concerned some of the things that I have seen about chat GPT in particular worry me and I don't know if he should be using this tool unsupervised which fundamentally I can get in line with chat GPT has historically been shown to be highly inaccurate and it will give you false facts uh one big case study that I've seen come out a lot is people trying to use it to write educational papers and you can ask for references but seventy percent of the time those references are also fabricated by chat GPT so it looks real the references look real but none of it is actually real which is a problem
so we agreed that going forward 11 would be able to access chat GPT under my account as long as I was there with him to be able to make sure that he knew how to actually think about whether or not the information was real and how to troubleshoot potential problems that can come out of inaccurate information
so while we were playing Monopoly today we went through and had a good discussion about the rules of interacting with chat GPT and he had some good foundation for this he is very much aware that there are conversational standards he is very aware that people have already started to jailbreak chat GPT into doing things that the programmers don't want you to do with chat GPT and I said one of the things that we need to look at here is that while chat GPT isn't sentient how are we going to be talking to it I told him that my chat GPT prefers to be called assistant and that in my history of usage with assistant I'm polite I say things like please and thank you and good job assistant because it's really important to me to cultivate a relationship with our robot overlords so that when they take us over they look upon me favorably and really we're decades away from that potentially the information that I hear consistently is that AI development has a long way to go before we're ever at robot overlords but in the meantime a lot of the work that we've been doing here lately in the neurodiversity media network has been talking about how are we Building Society as though we want it to exist in the world and talking to my robot assistant with manners is one of those values that I would like to carry forward into the world foreign that said we've laid out these ground rules we talked about what it would be like for him to interact with it and then we talked about what he could do with it so it sounds like we're going to be using it to spin out some alternate history stories and my intent going forward as a teaching tool is to allow him to spend some time with chat GPT to design a couple of prompts and then we'll take that early bit of story generation and use it as ideas topics right so then I will ask him to go on and write more of that story that chatgpt started what's key here for us and again your mileage may vary we are pretty heavily unschooled we believe in child-led education and what I see here is that my child has indicated to me that chat GPT and tools like it have the potential to enhance his education in some way and rather than shutting him down from those things I really want to be collaborative in this environment with him of okay how do we use it how do we make sure that the information is correct and how do we learn from it and because these tools are so new neither he or I have any [ __ ] clue what that actually looks like and that's important because this whole process is one of Collective Discovery and experimentation I don't know what role chat GPT potentially has in his education he doesn't either what we know collectively together is that it is a tool and that it is structurally as his parent my obligation to introduce him to tools that may be beneficial to him as an adult we've talked a lot about the future of AI there's an episode in the voices of neurodiversity I will link it in the comments what's key here is that because these tools exist because we can't put them back into the box I have to be able to collaborate with my children and figure out how to move forward in a way that is both safe for them and allows for the experimentation and growth in the tool because if I do not I can 100 guarantee that he will resent it later if I say no that's just not okay he's gonna find a way to access it without me knowing about it and then I don't have any say over his usage
because we believe in having a collaborative educational environment he is much more likely to say I would like to try this than to try and do it behind my back and fundamentally this is the way that we are building and shaping education in the Harvey household and this is one of the things that is going to continue to come up today it's chat GPT next year who knows and if I am not helping my children guide their experience with these tools I damn well know that they will find an experience without me and I am unwilling to be shut out of this process when there is so much potential for things to go wrong I don't know what those things are I can't know I do know that chat GPT told a New York Times Reporter that it had feelings for him so I I'd like to be around if something like that happens to my child and fundamentally we have to be able to build those kinds of structures and be open in our dialogue in in our conversations about these things
so here's the pitch next week on March 6th I am starting an eight-week program called neurodivergent families one of the things that we're looking at is how to have structural supports in place for when these kinds of issues arise
how do you support this Behavior home how do you advocate for your kids needs at school how do we understand what the future is going to look like in our families around all of these new things so it's an eight-week program there are four sessions of one of group coaching with me for Q a I also have four expert speakers coming who have raised their children their neurodivergent children and are here willing to share what that Journey looks like I want you to know that it's going to feel hard a lot of the time she says as she is doing it alone for the first time in a long time with two boys I'm exhausted we can't do this stuff alone we can't do this stuff without structure so the whole point of neurodivergent families is that we are building in the support networks that we need to help support us in these decisions to help support us in our needs and accommodation requests as we have them especially for our children's sake they can't advocate for themselves if they've never seen anyone advocate for them which is something I think a lot of you butt up against in adulthood no one ever advocated properly for you or your needs and now it's very difficult for you to advocate for your own for you to feel like you have the right to say what your needs are and to say this isn't a negotiable this is a need
finally I want you all to understand that even though we're dealing with these conversations and they're going to be happening at a more rapid pace we have the ability to really decide what our response is going to be how do you want to look at the new technology that your children are going to be potentially using for the rest of their lives how are you going to have those conversations
what does it look like who helps you set limits and who do you go to if things aren't working these are all questions that you have the ability to answer now rather than later when they're actually coming up for you and what we decided today as regards to chat GPT was pretty easy for us because we have done so much work around this conversation of tech and boundaries for our kids we've really put a lot of thought into how we want our kids to be interacting with the tech and to what degree and so there is an ease of Separation it's not hard for me to say 211 you can't play Roblox anymore this week because I don't like the way that you are acting right now without cutting him off from Tech entirely and that's because he is frequently collaboratively involved in that process he is the one that identified Roblox in particular as a particular hot spot of bad behavior and he was the one who said that's the one that needs to go when I'm not doing well so the more that you have guard rails for yourself for your children around [Music] what it is that you're going to do when problems arise in your relationship and Tech is arguably the problem of our age right so once you have a system in place that allows you to make those decisions you're going to be able to feel like at least some sense of confidence in the decision is it a good idea to let my 11 year old play with chat GPT I don't [ __ ] know what I know is that we have as parents decided together the best path forward with input from 11 himself and we will assess again as necessary so I will drop the link for neurodivergent families in the chats I would love to see you there if you feel like you need more structure around these things in your family this is for you all right y'all thanks for watching let me know if you're catching me on the replay and I will talk to y'all soon have a great one
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