> I remember often being “stuck” on some concept (usually in biology and chemistry), where the teacher would hand-wave something as truth, this dismissing my request for further depth.
This resonates with me a lot. I used to dismiss AI as useless hogwash, but have recently done a near total 180 as I realised it's quite useful for exploratory learning.
Not sure about others but a lot of my learning comes from comparison of a concept with other related concepts. Reading definitions off a page usually doesn't do it for me. I really need to dig to the heart of my understanding and challenge my assumptions, which is easiest done talking to someone. (You can't usually google "why does X do Y and not Z when ABC" and then spin off from that onto the next train of reasoning).
Hence ChatGPT is surprisingly useful. Even if it's wrong some of the time. With a combination of my baseline knowledge, logic, cross referencing, and experimentation, it becomes useful enough to advance my understanding. I'm not asking ChatGPT to solve my problem, more like I'm getting it to bounce off my thoughts until I discover a direction where I can solve my problem.
Indeed. I never really used AI until recently but now I use it sometimes as a smarter search engine that can give me abstracts.
Eg. it's easy to ask copilot: can you give me a list of free, open source mqtt brokers and give me some statistics in the form of a table
And copilot (or any other ai) does this quite nicely. This is not something that you can ask a traditional search engine.
Offcourse you do need to know enough of the underlying material and double check what output you get for when the AI is hallucinating.