> We can finally just take a photo of a textbook problem...
You nailed it. LLMs are an autodidact's dream. I've been working through a physics book with a good-old pencil and notebook and got stuck on some problems. It turned out the book did a poor job of explaining the concept at hand and I worked with ChatGPT+ to arrive at a more comprehensible derivation. Also the problems were badly worded and the AI explained that to me too. It even produced that Latex document study guide! Moreover, I can belabor a topic which I would not do with a human for fear of bothering them. So for me anyway, AI is not enabling brain rot, but brain enhancement. I find these technologies to be completely miraculous.
The first thing an autodidact learn is not to use a single source/book for learning anything.
The second thing is that you can't go over all books about anything in a lifetime. There is wisdom in choosing when to be ignorant.
The problem is that social systems aren't run off people teaching themselves things, and for many people being autodidact won't raise their status in any meaningful way, so these are a poor set of tradeoffs.