also it doesn't really help that, at least according to op's wording, they told the kid "[the internet and other broad terms] is wrong" and that's uh, that's a very dumb thing to say, assuming this ever happened at all. it's no wonder the kid (supposedly) assumed the teacher was just wrong.
it is what they said that they said - if that's not what they said *to* the kid it was poorly communicated to us, the readers, and considering their assessment of the kid's disposition toward them (vis a vis their trusted internet sources) it seems like it was poorly communicated to the kid as well
It's clear from the text that she is describing how the interaction must have felt. She is not reporting speech here. There's no poor communication issue going on here, except perhaps on the receiving end.
They didn't say "the internet is wrong", they said "this information you got is wrong" and the kid assumed this an adult refusing to admit they were incorrect -- a thing that has happened with teachers. They failed to explain chatGBT's badness but it's likely they were taken aback in the moment.
1) She's not quoting herself, she's paraphrasing, on a SM post with character limits.
2) We don't know the age of the student so we don't know what finer distinctions they're capable of grasping.
3) Teachers are trained in how to communicate with students effectively. You're a rando with internet.
OP did not say that to the kid. They're saying to us that they realized that's how the kid was interpreting what they were saying based on the kid's reaction. So that we as a learning audience might understand what we have to clarify to kids better, and what lessons were accidentally teaching now.
I tend to agree. When she said, "This is not a search bar", I was like, eh... I'm kind of with the kid here. This *is* a search bar, so of course he's going to think you are totally out of bounds if you tell him it's not.
What you need to get him to ask is, "What, exactly, does it search through"?
I'm just really skeptical about the implication here that kids cannot evaluate what Chat GPT, etc. are. They can, and they don't need a detailed, expert, technological explanation or understanding to do it.
This specific instance really appears to be a failure on the part of the teacher to hear what the student is saying about what he assumes about the infomation technology on his devices.
It looks like a search bar, but it isn't because it doesn't do search. It makes things up! Even if it makes up a correct answer, it's synthetic and not sourced. That's a different function than search.
This is so fundamental, and so many people just don't get it.
_Generative_ AI.
It doesn't search, it _generates_ a statistically likely string of tokens, given its training data and the prompt. With added noise, to _make sure_ it responds entirely differently to very similar, or the same, prompts.
OK, fair. But there's still something about the way it's being explained that is clearly setting the kid on edge. Instead of just "This isn't a search bar", you can say, "This is more like a command bar. It looks like a search bar,
"but what it actually does is give a command to Chat GPT to make something up that answers your request or command. The sources it uses to make something up can be anything, right or wrong, and what it comes up with can be right or wrong.
"It's not designed to produce correct information, just correct-SOUNDING information."
The sense of doom in the telling of how the kid reacted seems very weird to me.
My point is that there are any number of ways to explain to a child what ChatGPT and what it is appropriate and not appropriate for is in a way children can easily understand, and that should be within the capabilities of any well-trained teacher in this day and age.
Yes, it looks like a search bar. It mimics the functioning of a search bar. It produces results that look like search results, But it's not. I phrased that badly.
It looks like a search bar, but it isn't because it doesn't do search. It makes things up! Even if it makes up a correct answer, it's synthetic and not sourced. That's a different function than search.
You can explain to a kid *why* it's bad to use it like a search bar. It's possible!
And you can also explain why even an actual search bar's results need to be taken with healthy skepticism.
Children are good at skepticism.
