Yep, this is why I just don’t enjoy or get much value from exploring new topics with LLMs. Living in the Reddit factoid/listicle/TikTok explainer internet age my goal for years (going back well before ChatGPT hit the scene) has been to seek out high quality literature or academic papers for the subjects I’m interested in.

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.