Curious question for those who pay for courses or paid in last year : What makes you pay for them when you can have any major LLM like ChatGPT teach you patiently?
But that said, why would I buy a course over using an LLM? A couple of reasons come to mind:
1. I'm just more familiar/comfortable with the modality of listening to an instructor lecture and use visual aids, than chatting with an LLM when working on getting an understanding of a broad field. I see LLM's as more suited for more focused, "bite sized" interactions. For example, asking one how to solve a specific math problem that I am stuck on or something.
2. I also don't necessarily trust the LLM completely. And if I'm learning something that's very new to me, then by definition I won't be equipped to detect when the LLM is hallucinating. If I'm asking about something where it's easy to "check my answer" or confirm the information, then fine. But otherwise I still have a measure of skepticism (and I say this as somebody who is, in general, very "pro AI").
I feel this is similar to asking whether there would be value in paying for a well-written book on a topic, compared to just searching and reading information online on that topic, be it official documentation, or be it third-party information from blog posts, other articles.
In my opinion, a well-written course or book will give you a much deeper knowledge in a much more efficient way than what you get from ChatGPT or from searching the internet.