Coding With My Son — and ChatGPT

My editor's letter from the print edition of The Week, posted here (as usual) a few days late. It's a very short space, so there's a lot I couldn't get in. I think some folks might read it and wonder, "Wait, having a fourth grader run ChatGPT to come up with his programs is creative?'" The process is actually a lot more iterative. My son comes up with ideas, gets the ChatGPT code, ask ChatGPT for some changes, then downloads the code and uses it as a framework for his own programs. There are lots of changes. Nothing that's coming from ChatGPT works straight off the shelf. And in this case, it's just fine. And the leap from our earlier experiments with GPT-3 is just tremendous. That felt like it had just scoured Stack Overflow and tossed back ugly blocks of code. This is like going back and forth with a coding partner.

With speculation about the impact of AI reaching fever pitch in recent weeks, my son and I have been getting some first-hand experience by experimenting with ChatGPT—and the experience has been breathtaking. I know what the skeptics envision: Lost jobs. Dull and dreary AI-written white papers. And, as schools start to bring AI into their classrooms sad desks of kids staring into a screen, trying to learn history from a chatbot. That makes sense if your daily experience of AI is dealing with your car insurer’s miserable online help feature. AI has gotten plenty of positive press, of course, but much of it has been about the abilities of the new AI tools to retrieve and summarize information. Indeed, it can do that, and the results are passable, if often workmanlike.

But ChatGPT really shines in areas that have gotten less attention. It’s surprisingly good at making intuitive leaps. Ask it to describe a mythical European kingdom, and it will give you plenty of material to get your own ideas going. Generative AI is actually better when there's not a single right answer. And it is just uncanny at solving problems that combine general knowledge with math and programming. In fourth grade, my son has been learning about the American Revolution, so we asked ChatGPT to create a game simulating the pre-Revolutionary debate. It delivered a quiz-like computer program that let you pretend you were a patriot urging revolution. My son asked ChatGPT to modify it to it’s all strategy, no luck. Done, but too dry. Okay, so include some silly answers and make the scoring less predictable. All done. You’ve undoubtedly read about how AI makes cheating easy. Indeed it might. But watch a fourth grader build something in minutes that could have taken days or weeks and you start to see how AI can help kids be not just more efficient, but more creative. And in my book, that’s a win for us humans.