>Think of laboratory courses or courses where you need access to expensive equipment.

Why do you need equipment to learn something? You can learn the information outside of a lab.

>Also, there exist topics and degree courses that are much harder to learn by yourself than others.

Free AI like ChatGPT can assist with offering many different explanations personalized for someone to make it easier to learn.

> Free AI like ChatGPT can assist with offering many different explanations personalized for someone to make it easier to learn.

What I can tell you is the following: a lot of academic topics are quite subtle - to get to more than a basic level, you have to learn things that are very subtle, and where you only can judge the correctness of the information years later (basically when you have finished your degree or even PhD).

Because of this, I would rather read the most renowned (and ideally hardest) textbooks in the respective area (if you really need to cheap out, download them at some shadow library) instead of trusting some AI.

I can tell you that for quite a lot of questions in my area of expertise, the answers that AIs gave were far from being sufficiently reliable for learners who want to get a deep knowledge about the topic, and the errors were often quite subtle.

In mathematics, for example, it is not uncommon to hang for hours over a page or even a paragraph, trying to understand why the statement holds - and this in a situation where the proof is for sure correct. Now imagine the situation of hanging over a page of text that you will need hours for understanding when you cannot even rely on the prior that the information in the text is correct ...

Surprisingly, reading about something is very often not at all equivalent to actually doing it.

The information is how to use a lab, so you can do research, you know, the thing that happens largely on university campuses. (Now why taxpayer funded labs end up patenting things for private corporations, that’s what’s peculiar to me!)

Another example is history. It's theoretically possible to become an academic historian through private study and there are certainly no legal barriers to it, yet amateurs almost never make the transition except through higher education.