This. I would never allow my kids onto a platform like Ello. My kids are starting to appreciate being shielded from social media and technology in their lives as they watch their friends go down dark paths and stuck in feeling like they have to participate there.
I don't think kids, of any age, should be in front of LLMs unless by complete agreement of their parents and only after their parents are made very aware of how this technology came to be, how it can be used and how it cannot be guaranteed to be safe. Ello leading with that is disingenuous from the start and that should tell parents all they need to know up front.
My kids read hundreds of books a year. They love reading, we read with them every single day as they learned. They learned to read the right way and that doesn't involve a screen.
If I may, the argument of "screen" isn't necessarily the right one, the right way might not be the only right way, I have an almost 2-year old daughter and I've bought an e-ink (colored) tablet to show her family pictures, stories and so-on (very sparingly, maybe about 15min a day), we also generate books with images and short stories about what went during this week with the pictures we have and apply a child style to it, and it has been really great so far. It's not about "paper", it's about the software itself and the hardware not being toxic/addictive. In my side, she has a whole library in her playpen with already about 30 books (multiple languages), I would never put her on Youtube or anything like it, but carefully curating the content and showing it on eink, I see absolutely no problem.
Example of page we generate (average "book" has 4-8 pages like this):
https://ibb.co/Ld9mp10v
She loves it, she is engaged into it, this is from an LLM, I don't see the problem with it, I also don't see how it's a problem to generate LLM-made written stories as well, they can be great, personalized and better in many scenarios than random books. I will definitely build learning materials entirely made by AI as well.
Now regarding this project, I feel it's indeed quite dangerous, but I feel as a complementary learning thing, it could be great, for example post-school, 30min of this daily to consolidate learning might be beneficial, I will do so at quite a young age, but with my own softwares & devices of course, not that.
We aren't even living in the US :p - little harmless hallucination from model.
PS: Those animals are from her collection of plush toys which I've individually put as a Sprite for AI usage, I got about 50 plush toys (1 a week in average), mostly used to benchmark her to see if she can recognize the animals from the books she is reading, and she does, all of them, it's a very useful purchase.
This probably isn’t for kids like yours or mine, who have engaged parents who read to them every day and foster learning in more resource-intensive ways. Like it or not, many kids have nothing like this. I’m sympathetic to the idea that they’re better off with Ello than nothing, which is their realistic alternative.
I don't think kids, of any age, should be in front of LLMs unless by complete agreement of their parents and only after their parents are made very aware of how this technology came to be, how it can be used and how it cannot be guaranteed to be safe. Ello leading with that is disingenuous from the start and that should tell parents all they need to know up front.
My kids read hundreds of books a year. They love reading, we read with them every single day as they learned. They learned to read the right way and that doesn't involve a screen.
Keep kids out of this garbage.