You can talk to yourself while reading books and searching the web for information. I don't think the fact that you're learning from information the LLM is pulling in means you're really conversing with it.

I do find LLMs very useful and am extremely impressed by them, I'm not saying you can't learn things this way at all.

But there's nobody else on the line with you. And while they will emit text which contradicts what you say if it's wrong enough, they've been heavily trained to match where you're steering things, even if you're trying to avoid doing any steering.

You can mostly understand how these work and still end up in a feedback loop that you don't realize is a feedback loop. I think this might even be more likely the more the thing has to offer you in terms of learning - the less qualified you are on the subject, the less you can tell when it's subtly yes-and'ing you.

I think the nature of a conversational interface that responds to natural language questions is fundamentally different to the idea that you talk to yourself while reading information sources. I'm not sure it's useful to dismiss the idea that we can talk with a machine.

The current generation of LLMs have had their controversies, but these are still pre alpha products, and I suspect in the future we will look back on releasing them unleashed as a mistake. There's no reason the mistakes they make today can't be improved upon.

If your experiences with learning from a machine are similar to mine, then we can both see a whole new world coming that's going to take advantage of this interface.