What I love most about history is it has lots of irreducible complexity and poring over the literature, both primary and secondary sources, is often the only way to develop an understanding.
Because it's quite long, if I asked Perplexity* to remind me what something meant, it would very rarely return something helpful, but, to be fair, I cant really fault it for being a bit useless with a very difficult to comprehend text, where there are several competing styles of reading, many of whom are convinced they are correct.
But I started to notice a pattern of where it would pull answers from some weird spots, especially when I asked it to do deep research. Like, a paper from a University's server that's using concepts in the book to ground qualitative research, which is fine and practical explications are often useful ways into a dense concept, but it's kinda a really weird place to be the first initial academic source. It'll draw on Reddit a weird amount too, or it'll somehow pull a page of definitions from a handout for some University tutorial. And it wont default to the peer reviewed free philosophy encyclopedias that are online and well known.
It's just weird. I was just using it to try and reinforce my actual reading of the text but I more came away thinking that in certain domains, this end of AI is allowing people to conflate having access to information, with learning about something.
*it's just what I have access to.
So something like this: "Here's a PDF file containing Being and Time. Please explain the significance of anxiety (Angst) in the uncovering of Being."
For example when I've wanted to understand an unfolding story better than the news, I've told it to ignore the media and go only to original sources (e.g. speech transcripts, material written by the people involved, etc.)