ChatGPT is overly safe in terms of personality and the worldview it presents when asked. it's a great tool to learn, more so than a teacher because you can freely ask it very specific questions in your own words and it will give an understandable answer. I think it's actually a perfect tool for someone that age. Once the topics get too advanced, the results become less reliable though.

It doesnt make things up anymore as much as it used to. It still does sometimes with topics that are less commonly discussed in the dataset it's trained on (this is similar with websearch). It will however confidently claim that it's answer is correct sometimes. As long as you understand that it's not always correct and have the sense to verify things that seem off, you'll be fine.

You'll get the best results from the paid GPT4 subscription (20 dollars a month), which i would recommend.

The only real risk i see is overreliance on it. I notice this in myself too, it's almost like i forgot googling things is an option, so when i'm stuck rather than trying another approaxh, i just keep throwing prompts at GPT-4 until i give up and find the solution elsewhere, often within minutes. The way things are going, classic web search is becoming obsolete (unreliable result because of AI written content and fake news) while AI actively tries to be unbiased.

tldr: Yes, it's extremely useful, make sure they don't forget how to do things without chatgpt too.