REVIEW 3 major objections 5 minor 41 references
Building babyGPTs: Youth Engaging in Data Practices and Ethical Considerations through the Construction of Generative Language Models
T0 review · 3 major / 5 minor · reviewed 2026-08-16 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read A case study shows three teenagers successfully building a small generative language model, not just using one.
desk verdict A genuinely novel but carefully scoped case study of teens building a dataset and evaluating a small GPT; the 'building' claim overreaches, but the paper earns a serious read. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The central object is the 'babyGPT' construction activity: a small generative language model that youth build by choosing a text domain, assembling a curated dataset of roughly 75,000 to 300,000 tokens, tokenizing it with a provided script, designing prompts as generation 'seeds', and submitting a training request specifying how long the model should train. The paper's analysis then codes video recordings and artifacts against an inventory of AI/ML data practices (cited as [38]) and a construction process framework (cited as [26]), which together supply the categories that turn the observed classroom activity into evidence that the youth engaged in data practices and ethical reasoning. The training itself is carried out by a researcher after the workshop using a lightweight GPT training framework (cited as [30]), so the machinery that carries the argument is the designed pipeline plus the analytic coding, not the model training itself.
What would settle it
A direct test would run the same workshop with the training step left to the youth themselves (for example, on unlocked computers with a simplified training interface) and observe whether they can complete it; a finding that they cannot, or a replication with a randomly selected group showing no spontaneous data-quality or ethical reasoning, would narrow or undercut the feasibility claim as stated.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
On its own terms, the paper's discovery is that three 14- to 15-year-olds, given a scripted construction pipeline, can carry out the human parts of building a small generative language model. The team of Dillpickle, Optimus, and Cyclops selected Marvel screenplays, debated which films to include and exclude on quality grounds, ran a tokenization script, monitored the resulting token counts, requested a 5-minute and a 1-hour training run, and then evaluated the trained model's outputs, observing that the text lacked screenplay structure and a coherent narrative arc. When asked about using copyrighted scripts, they reasoned about copyright, attribution, and authorship, with one member imagining selling the model's script to Marvel and reflecting that the AI, not a human writer, produced it. The authors frame this as evidence that youth can engage in ML data practices—collecting data, controlling data quality, preparing data, and evaluating performance—and that constructing GLMs is a feasible route to AI/ML literacy.
Load-bearing premise
The load-bearing premise is that selecting, curating, and tokenizing a dataset, writing prompts, and evaluating outputs counts as 'building a GLM', even though the model training itself was performed by a researcher after the workshop rather than by the teenagers.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- If the feasibility claim holds, youth AI education has a working template: kids can meaningfully design small generative models through data curation, prompt design, and output evaluation even when the compute-heavy training step is handled by adults.
- Construction activities of this kind can shift youth's stance toward generative AI from passive acceptance of outputs to critical examination—here, recognizing missing screenplay structure and narratively incoherent text.
- Ethical questions of copyright and attribution arise naturally during dataset construction, which may make them more concrete and memorable than in abstract lessons.
- The study motivates building easier-to-use tools for novices to train, validate, and fine-tune their own models, since the only barrier to hands-on training in this case was blocked terminal access at school.
- It also indicates that youth's data practices are iterative and non-linear, which has design implications for how workshop time and scaffolding are structured.
Reading between the lines
- The paper's own evidence supports a narrower claim than the abstract's 'building GLMs': because the teenagers never ran the training, the demonstrated capability is building the data pipeline and evaluating outputs, not completing the full model-building loop. A stricter feasibility test would put the training step in the youth's hands.
- The case was chosen for having the most complete data, so the demonstration likely represents a best case; whether typical groups engage this deeply is untested.
- A testable extension would compare AI-literacy gains between youth who build babyGPTs and youth who only use commercial chatbots, measuring their later ability to explain how LLMs work or critique model outputs.
- The youth's ethical reasoning, such as the scenario of selling a model-generated script to Marvel, suggests that building with copyrighted data can push adolescents toward nuanced thinking about derivative authorship; a future design could deliberately scaffold that into a fuller fair-use lesson.
Signed reviews
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. This paper reports a five-day workshop in which 35 ninth-grade students designed and built small generative language models ('babyGPTs') using the nanoGPT framework. The authors focus on a single team of three teenagers who created a Marvel-screenplay generator, curating and tokenizing a dataset of roughly 80,000 tokens, selecting prompts, submitting a training request, and evaluating the outputs of the resulting model. Using video recordings, artifacts, and saved files, the authors construct a descriptive case study and analyze it with Olari and Romeike's inventory of AI/ML data practices. They report that the youth engaged in data collection, data quality control, data preparation, and performance evaluation, and that they grappled with ethical issues around copyright, authorship, and attribution. The paper's central claim is that this case study demonstrates the feasibility of engaging youth in building GLMs, positioning them as designers rather than merely users of generative AI.
Significance. If the central claim is accepted, this paper makes a useful contribution to child-computer interaction and AI/ML education by extending constructionist approaches from classification tasks to generative language models. The strength of the paper lies in its rich qualitative data: the authors provide detailed vignettes of youth decision-making about dataset composition, their reasoning about copyright and attribution, and their critical evaluations of model outputs. The use of an external data-practices framework (Olari and Romeike) and the availability of artifacts (datasets, model files, outputs) lend transparency to the analysis. The paper also honestly reports the institutional constraint that prevented youth from performing training themselves (footnote 4). However, the framing of what constitutes 'building' a GLM is broader than what was actually demonstrated, and this overreach affects the paper's central feasibility claim. The result is a plausible and valuable exploratory case study whose scope needs to be stated more precisely.
major comments (3)
- [Abstract; Section 3.2, footnote 4; Section 5] The central claim that the case study 'demonstrates the feasibility of engaging youth in building GLMs' overreaches the observed activities. Although the youth curated and tokenized a dataset, chose prompts, and evaluated outputs, all model training was performed by a researcher after the workshop because school administrators blocked terminal access; the youth's only training-related action was selecting a training duration on a request form. The Discussion itself defers 'explore validation and training loss, adjust weights, or finetune pre-trained models' to future work, which concedes that these parts of the training loop were absent. The abstract should be reworded to claim feasibility of youth constructing datasets, specifying training requests, and evaluating outputs of a researcher-trained model, or the paper should explicitly define 'building' to include researcher-mediated training.
- [Section 3.3] The case was chosen because it had the most complete data (filled-in worksheets, saved datasets, attendance). The paper presents this as a feasibility demonstration without acknowledging that this is a best-case selection; readers cannot tell whether the observed engagement is typical or even achievable by other groups. The Discussion should explicitly state that the claim is limited to a best-case demonstration and that future work is needed to test generalizability.
- [Section 1 and Section 4] The introduction states that participants engaged in 'implementing a solution' as one of the data practices, but the Findings describe the youth running a provided tokenization script and filling out a training request form; they did not implement the model or training pipeline. This is internally inconsistent and should be corrected either by removing 'implementing a solution' from the list of observed practices or by explaining how tokenization and training requests constitute implementation in this context.
minor comments (5)
- [Section 3.2] The names 'Kaparthy' and 'Bathia' are misspelled; the references cite Andrej Karpathy and Aatish Bhatia.
- [Section 4, Figure 1] The text says 'see Figure 1' but the caption does not describe the output fragment; consider adding a caption that explains what is shown.
- [Section 3.1] The demographic description notes that all participants identified as White, but the paper does not discuss how this limits the generalizability of the findings; a sentence acknowledging this would be appropriate.
- [Title and Abstract] The title and abstract refer to 'babyGPTs' (plural), but the case study follows one team building one model; consider clarifying whether the workshop had multiple groups and that the case is a single exemplar.
- [Section 5] The sentence 'Our findings suggest that constructing GLMs should be an integral part of efforts to foster AI/ML literacies' is stronger than a single-case study supports; consider softening to 'may' or 'could'.
Circularity Check
No circularity found: the case study's qualitative findings are coded with an external data-practices framework and do not reduce to the paper's own inputs.
full rationale
No load-bearing circular step is present. The paper's central claim—that a case study demonstrates the feasibility of youth engaging in GLM construction—is supported by observational data (video, artifacts, dataset and output files) and analyzed through external frameworks: Olari and Romeike's inventory of ML data practices and Iversen et al.'s construction process. There is no parameter fitting, no fitted quantity relabeled as a prediction, and no uniqueness theorem imported from the authors' prior work. The one self-citation (Tseng et al. 2024, Ref. [41], which includes one of the present authors) appears in a background list of research outlining data practices and is not load-bearing; the actual analysis relies on Olari and Romeike [38], an external source. The researcher-mediated training reported in footnote 4 is a transparently disclosed scope limitation: youth designed datasets, tokenized text, chose training durations, and evaluated outputs, while a researcher executed the training after the workshop. This narrows the strength of the feasibility claim but does not make the analysis circular, because the observed youth practices are not defined in terms of the conclusion, nor is any result derived by construction from its own inputs. The choice of the group with the most complete data is standard exploratory case-study sampling and is acknowledged in Section 3.3; it bears on generalizability, not circularity. Overall, the derivation chain is self-contained and the findings are externally anchored.
Assumptions & free parameters
assumptions (4)
- ad hoc to paper Youth activity described as 'building a GLM' can include dataset creation and training requests even when model training is performed by researchers.
- domain assumption A descriptive case study of a single team selected for the most complete data is sufficient evidence of feasibility.
- domain assumption Olari and Romeike's inventory of AI/ML data practices provides a valid and comprehensive coding framework.
- domain assumption Ethical reasoning elicited by researcher prompts reflects the youth's genuine considerations.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Building babyGPTs: Youth Engaging in Data Practices and Ethical Considerations through the Construction of Generative Language Models." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/E4DD7J3N
@misc{pith2026250414769,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Building babyGPTs: Youth Engaging in Data Practices and Ethical Considerations through the Construction of Generative Language Models},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/E4DD7J3N}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2504.14769}
}
read the original abstract
As generative language models (GLMs) have gained popularity, youth are increasingly using them in their everyday lives. As such, most research has centered on supporting youth as users of GLM-powered systems. However, we know little of how to engage youth in the design of these models. Building on the rich legacy of child-computer interaction research that positions youth as designers of computing systems, we explore how to support young people in designing GLMs. Through a case study of three teenagers (ages 14-15) building a babyGPT screenplay generator, we illustrate how the team developed a model while engaging in artificial intelligence/machine learning-relevant data practices and addressing ethical issues. This paper contributes a case study that demonstrates the feasibility of engaging youth in building GLMs.
Figures
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
Safinah Ali, Prerna Ravi, Randi Williams, Daniella DiPaola, and Cynthia Breazeal. 2024. Constructing dreams using generative AI. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence . AAAI, , 23268–23275
work page 2024
-
[2]
Lauren Alvarez, Isabella Gransbury, Veronica Cateté, Tiffany Barnes, Ákos Ledéczi, and Shuchi Grover. 2022. A socially relevant focused AI curriculum designed for female high school students. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence . AAAI, , 12698–12705
work page 2022
-
[3]
Golnaz Arastoopour Irgens, Hazel Vega, Ibrahim Adisa, and Cinamon Bailey. 2022. Characterizing children’s conceptual knowledge and computational practices in a critical machine learning educational program. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction 34 (Dec. 2022), 100541. doi:10.1016/ j.ijcci.2022.100541
arXiv 2022
-
[4]
Amanda M. Bell. 2015. Learning complex systems with story-building in scratch. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (Boston, Massachusetts) (IDC ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 307–310. doi:10.1145/2771839. 2771903
-
[5]
Aatish Bhatia. 2023. Watch an A.I. Learn to Write by Reading Nothing but Shakespeare. The New York Times , (2023), . https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2023/04/26/upshot/gpt-from-scratch.html
work page 2023
-
[6]
Karl-Emil Kjær Bilstrup, Magnus Høholt Kaspersen, Niels Olof Bouvin, and Marianne Graves Petersen. 2024. ml-machine.org: Infrastructuring a Research Product to Disseminate AI Literacy in Education. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Honolulu, HI, USA) (CHI ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, N...
arXiv 2024
-
[7]
Jie Chao, Rebecca Ellis, Shiyan Jiang, Carolyn Rosé, William Finzer, Cansu Tatar, James Fiacco, and Kenia Wiedemann. 2023. Exploring artificial intelligence in english language arts with storyq. In Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence , Vol. 37. AAAI, , 15999–16003
work page 2023
-
[9]
Jiaju Chen, Yuxuan Lu, Shao Zhang, Bingsheng Yao, Yuanzhe Dong, Ying Xu, Yunyao Li, Qianwen Wang, Dakuo Wang, and Yuling Sun. 2024. StorySparkQA: Expert-Annotated QA Pairs with Real-World Knowledge for Children’s Story-Based Learning. InProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing . , , 17351–17370
work page 2024
Show all 41 references
-
[11]
Nicoletta Di Blas and Bianca Boretti. 2009. Interactive storytelling in pre-school: a case-study. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (Como, Italy) (IDC ’09). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 44–51. doi:1...
2009 doi
-
[12]
Davidson, Leah Findlater, and R
Griffin Dietz Smith, Siddhartha Prasad, Matt J. Davidson, Leah Findlater, and R. Benjamin Shapiro. 2024. ContextQ: Generated Questions to Support Meaningful Parent-Child Dialogue While Co-Reading. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference...
2024
-
[13]
Christian Dindler, Rachel Smith, and Ole Sejer Iversen. 2020. Computational empowerment: participatory design in education. CoDesign 16, 1 (2020), 66–80
2020
-
[14]
Stefania Druga, Fee Lia Christoph, and Amy J Ko. 2022. Family as a Third Space for AI Literacies: How do children and parents learn about AI together?. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New Orleans, LA, USA) (CHI ’22). Association...
2022
-
[15]
Stefania Druga and Nancy Otero. 2023. Scratch Copilot Evaluation: Assessing AI-Assisted Creative Coding for Families. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.10417 (2023),
2023 arXiv
-
[16]
Stefania Druga, Nancy Otero, and Amy J. Ko. 2022. The Landscape of Teaching Resources for AI Education. InProceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Vol. 1 . ACM, Dublin Ireland, 96–102. doi:10.1145/3502718.3524782
2022
-
[17]
Allison Druin. 1998. The design of children’s technology . Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA
1998
-
[18]
Ana Maria Bustamante Duarte, Nina Brendel, Auriol Degbelo, and Christian Kray. 2018. Participatory design and participatory research: An HCI case study with young forced migrants. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 25, 1 (2018), 1–39
2018
-
[20]
Idit Harel. 1991. Children designers: Interdisciplinary constructions for learning and knowing mathematics in a computer-rich school. Ablex Publishing, Norwood, NJ
1991
-
[21]
Idit Harel and Seymour Papert. 1990. Software design as a learning environment. Interactive learning environments 1, 1 (1990), 1–32
1990
-
[22]
Hedderich, Natalie N
Michael A. Hedderich, Natalie N. Bazarova, Wenting Zou, Ryun Shim, Xinda Ma, and Qian Yang. 2024. A Piece of Theatre: Investigating How Teachers Design LLM Chatbots to Assist Adolescent Cyberbullying Education. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Comp...
2024
-
[23]
Arthur Hjorth. 2021. NaturalLanguageProcesing4All: - A Constructionist NLP tool for Scaffolding Students’ Exploration of Text. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (Virtual Event, USA) (ICER 2021). Association for Computing Ma...
2021
-
[25]
Netta Iivari, Leena Ventä-Olkkonen, Heidi Hartikainen, Sumita Sharma, Essi Lehto, Jenni Holappa, and Tonja Molin-Juustila. 2023. Computational empowerment of children: Design research on empowering and impactful designs by children. International Journal of Child-Computer Inte...
2023
-
[26]
Ole Sejer Iversen, Rachel Charlotte Smith, and Christian Dindler. 2017. Child as Protagonist: Expanding the Role of Children in Participatory Design. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children (Stanford, California, USA) (IDC ’17). Association for...
2017
-
[27]
Ole Sejer Iversen, Rachel Charlotte Smith, and Christian Dindler. 2018. From computational thinking to computational empowerment: a 21st century PD agenda. In Proceedings of the 15th Participatory Design Conference: Full Papers - Volume 1 (Hasselt and Genk, Belgium) (PDC ’18)....
2018
-
[28]
Shiyan Jiang, Hengtao Tang, Cansu Tatar, Carolyn P Rosé, and Jie Chao. 2023. High school students’ data modeling practices and processes: from modeling unstructured data to evaluating automated decisions. Learning, Media and Technology 48, 2 (2023), 350–368
2023
-
[29]
Yasmin B Kafai. 1995. Minds in play: Computer game design as a context for children’s learning . Earlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ
1995
-
[30]
Andrej Karpathy. 2024. NanoGPT. https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT
2024
-
[31]
Magnus Høholt Kaspersen. 2023. AI education that matters: Designing computationally empowering learning tools for machine learning . Ph. D. Dissertation. Aarhus Universitet
2023
-
[32]
Megumi Kivuva, Jayne Everson, Camilo Montes De Haro, and Amy J
F. Megumi Kivuva, Jayne Everson, Camilo Montes De Haro, and Amy J. Ko. 2024. Cultural-Centric Computational Embroidery. In Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (Portland, OR, USA) (SIGCSE 2024). Association for Computing Machinery,...
2024
-
[33]
Irene Lee, Safinah Ali, Helen Zhang, Daniella DiPaola, and Cynthia Breazeal. 2021. Developing Middle School Students’ AI Literacy. In Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (Virtual Event, USA) (SIGCSE ’21). Association for Computing Mach...
2021
-
[34]
I Said Knight, Not Night!
Zhixin Li, Trisha Thomas, Chi-Lin Yu, and Ying Xu. 2024. "I Said Knight, Not Night!": Children’s Communication Breakdowns and Repairs with AI Versus Human Partners. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (Delft, Netherlands) (IDC ’24)....
2024
-
[36]
I want it to talk like Darth Vader
Michele Newman, Kaiwen Sun, Ilena B Dalla Gasperina, Grace Y. Shin, Matthew Kyle Pedraja, Ritesh Kanchi, Maia B. Song, Rannie Li, Jin Ha Lee, and Jason Yip. 2024. "I want it to talk like Darth Vader": Helping Children Construct Creative Self-Efficacy with Generative AI. In Pro...
2024
-
[37]
Narges Norouzi, Snigdha Chaturvedi, and Matthew Rutledge. 2020. Lessons Learned from Teaching Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to High School Students. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 34, 09 (April 2020), 13397–13403. doi:10.1609/a...
2020 doi
-
[38]
Viktoriya Olari and Ralf Romeike. 2024. Data-related practices for creating Artificial Intelligence systems in K-12. In Proceedings of the 19th WiPSCE Conference on Primary and Secondary Computing Education Research (Munich, Germany) (WiPSCE ’24). Association for Computing Mac...
2024
-
[39]
Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon. 1971. Twenty Things to Do With a Computer. Artificial Intelligence Memo Number 248.Artificial Intelligence Memos (1971),
1971
-
[40]
Jaemarie Solyst, Ellia Yang, Shixian Xie, Jessica Hammer, Amy Ogan, and Motahhare Eslami. 2024. Children’s Overtrust and Shifting Perspectives of Generative AI. Proceedings of the International Conference of the Learning Sciences , (2024), 905–912
2024
-
[41]
Davidson, Luis Morales-Navarro, Jennifer King Chen, Victoria Delaney, Mark Leibowitz, Jazbo Beason, and R
Tiffany Tseng, Matt J. Davidson, Luis Morales-Navarro, Jennifer King Chen, Victoria Delaney, Mark Leibowitz, Jazbo Beason, and R. Benjamin Shapiro. 2024. Co-ML: Collaborative Machine Learning Model Building for Developing Dataset Design Practices. ACM Trans. Comput. Educ. 24, ...
2024 doi
-
[42]
Ta, and Yoshihiro Kawahara
Tiffany Tseng, Yumiko Murai, Natalie Freed, Deanna Gelosi, Tung D. Ta, and Yoshihiro Kawahara. 2021. PlushPal: Storytelling with Interactive Plush Toys and Machine Learning. In Interaction Design and Children . ACM, Athens Greece, 236–245. doi:10.1145/3459990.3460694
2021
-
[43]
Henriikka Vartiainen, Tapani Toivonen, Ilkka Jormanainen, Juho Kahila, Matti Tedre, and Teemu Valtonen. 2021. Machine learning for middle schoolers: Learning through data-driven design. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction 29 (2021), 100281
2021
-
[44]
Randi Williams, Hae Won Park, Lauren Oh, and Cynthia Breazeal. 2019. Popbots: Designing an artificial intelligence curriculum for early childhood education. In Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence , Vol. 33. AAAI, , 9729–9736
2019
-
[45]
Ramalingam, G
Gokul Yenduri, M. Ramalingam, G. Chemmalar Selvi, Y. Supriya, Gautam Srivastava, Praveen Kumar Reddy Maddikunta, G. Deepti Raj, Rutvij H. Jhaveri, B. Prabadevi, Weizheng Wang, Athanasios V. Vasilakos, and Thippa Reddy Gadekallu. 2024. GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer)— ...
2024
-
[46]
Robert K Yin. 2018. Case study research and applications. Manuscript submitted to ACM
2018
Reviewed August 16, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.