Especially for fields that I didn’t study at the Bachelors or Masters level, like biology. Getting to engage with deeper research with a knowledgeable tutor assistant has enabled me to go deeper than I otherwise could.
This might sound cumbersome but without the LLM I wouldn't have (1) known what to search for, in a way (2) that lets me incrementally build a mental model. So it's a net win for me. The only gap I see is coverage/recall: when asked for different techniques to accomplish something, the LLM might miss some techniques - and what is missed depends upon the specific LLM. My solution here is asking multiple LLMs and going back to Google search.
You use your brain and cross-reference multiple sources.
Even traditional research methods return bogus information. People are just wrong sometimes and you as a researcher have to deal with that.
The way to deal with LLM accuracy is to not trust it blindly. Same as everything. The LLM will try to convince you and itself that it's right even when it isn't. But you can say the same for a shockingly large number of historic works written by explorers and people who had no clue what they were talking about.
I’m not trying to master these subjects for any practical purpose. It’s curiosity and learning.
It’s not the same as taking a class; not worse either. It’s a different type of learning for specific situations.
Perhaps in low stakes situations it could at least guarantee some entertainment value. Though I worry that folks will get into high stakes situations without the tools to distinguish facts from smoothly worded slop.
To your point, it would be easy to accidentally accept things as true (especially the more subjective "why" things), but the hit rate is good enough that I'm still getting tons of value through this approach. With respect to mistakes, it's honestly not that different from learning something wrong from a friend or a teacher, which, frankly, happens all the time. So it pretty much comes down to the individual person's skepticism and desire for deep understanding, which usually will reveal such falsehoods.
The texts have to be short and high-level for the assistants to have any chance of accurately explaining them.
You won't be able to verify everything taught from first principles, so do have to at some point give different sources different credibility I think.
No it isnt.
But I’m not trying to become an expert in these subjects. If I were, this isn’t the tool I’d use in isolation (which I don’t for these cases anyway.)
Part of reading, questioning, interpreting, and thinking about these things is (a) defining concepts I don’t understand and (b) digging into the levels beneath what I might.
It doesn’t have to be 100% correct to understand the shape and implications of a given study. And I don’t leave any of these interactions thinking, “ah, now I am an expert!”
Even if it were perfectly correct, neither my memory nor understanding is. That’s fine. If I continue to engage with the topic, I’ll make connections and notice inconsistencies. Or I won’t! Which is also fine. It’s right enough to be net (incredibly) useful compared to what I had before.
And there’s always some risk.