Do you think we are helping K-12 students by letting AI doing hallucinated thinking for them? What incredible "AI skills" will they be missing out on if we restrict the exposure? How to type things in a text box and adjust your question until you get what you want?
We are creating a massive competency gap by treating AI exposure as somehow more dangerous than social media, which we've already allowed to reshape adolescent development with inarguably negative educational value.
AI is already redefining job requirements and academic expectations. Students who first encounter these tools in college will be competing against peers who've had years to develop working usage patterns and build domain specific applications.
Likewise, using LLMs as an API for software they create to call sounds like it would give them insight into what LLMs are good for.
The act of just "conversing" with an LLM doesn't seem like much of a skill. I find it hard to reconcile the idea that one needs training or experience to use an LLM when contrasted with how LLM products are being advertised to the "everyman".
I simply don't buy that there's skill associated with using LLMs as an end user beyond the skills that you'd use for checking the validity of any other source. (Granted, everybody is pretty terrible at that anyway.) If anything, the LLM should be treated with more skepticism and subjected to more fact checking than human-created or curated sources.
The level of public LLM adoption tells me that they're not hard to use. The companies who make them are doing their best to make them useful for everyone. Any "moat" created by having "skills" associated with using an LLM will be drained. The companies want them to be useful to everyone, not just to people with "skills".
re: social media
Personally, I see "social media" as vastly more deleterious than LLMs alone. ("Social media" and LLMs, together, are a force-multiplier of badness.)
I already don't think there should be a place in schools for "social media", in terms of a curricular subject. I'd appalled if administrators approached "social media" as a part of the curriculum with the enthusiasm I'm seeing for LLMs.