I find it so much more intellectually stimulating then most of what I find online. Reading e.g. a 600 page book about some specific historical event gives me so much more perspective and exposure to different aspects I never would have thought to ask about on my own, or would have been elided when clipped into a few sentence summary.
I have gotten some value out of asking for book recommendations from LLMs, mostly as a starting point I can use to prune a list of 10 books down into a 2 or 3 after doing some of my research on each suggestion. But talking to a chatbot to learn about a subject just doesn’t do anything for me for anything deeper than basic Q&A where I simply need a (hopefully) correct answer and nothing more.
If you don't have access to a community like that learning stuff in a technical field can be practically impossible. Having an llm to ask infinite silly/dumb/stupid questions can be super helpful and save you days of being stuck on silly things, even though it's not perfect.
It’s called basic research skills - don’t they teach this anymore in high school, let alone college? How ever did we get by with nothing but an encyclopedia or a library catalog?