Parents are turning to OpenAI’s ChatGPT in increasing numbers for child rearing advice — and the results of that uncontrolled experiment are anyone’s guess.
They’re asking ChatGPT how to handle behavioral problems or for medical advice when their kids are sick, USA Today reports, which dovetails with a 2024 study that found parents trust ChatGPT over real health professionals and also deem the information generated by the bot to be trustworthy.
It all comes in addition to parents using ChatGPT to keep kids entertained by having the bot read their children bedtime stories or talk with them for hours.
All this offloading of parental responsibility to AI is alarming because one of ChatGPT’s biggest flaws, its manipulative and sycophantic nature, is known to intensify delusions and cause breaks from reality — a grim phenomenon that’s been linked to numerous suicides, including several teenagers.
The ages of kids being exposed to ChatGPT and its advice is clearly dropping. Some 30 percent of parents of school-age children used ChatGPT back in 2023, and that number has undoubtedly gotten bigger.
A pediatric doctor told USA Today that if parents still want to use ChatGPT, despite all the known negatives, they must practice due diligence with the information that the bot generates and use it with a “critical eye” because of the technology’s propensity for sycophancy and hallucinating fake answers.
“It’s a tool and it’s incredible and it’s getting more pervasive,” Chief Medical Officer Michael Glazier of Bluebird Kids Health in Broward County, Florida told the newspaper. “But don’t let it take the place of critical thinking… There’s a lot of benefit for us as parents to think things through and consult experts versus just plugging it into a computer.”
Glazier also advised parents to use ChatGPT only as a jumping-off point, and to ultimately consult with a medical expert.
Another issue that parents should be aware of is privacy. They shouldn’t input sensitive, personal information about their children and their medical issues into ChatGPT, experts warn; handing over intimate information to a tech company is problematic on its face, and malicious actors may also hack your personal data.
Basically, parents should proceed with caution when using the bot and take anything from its virtual lips with a grain of salt.
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