I tried that out in my field of expertise, to calibrate my expectations. ChatGPT invented multiple references to non-existent but plausibly-titled papers written by me.

I think of that when asking questions about areas I don’t know.

That was about 18mo ago, so maybe this kind of hallucination is under control these days.

My biggest issue with Udemy courses is that it's not easy to vet the instructor. User ratings are unreliable since beginners aren't really in a position to evaluate a teacher's expertise.

If Udemy's pitch were “Learn X as Taught by Notable People in the Field,” I would have signed up in a heartbeat.

- 3D Graphics taught by Michael Abrash

- Card Manipulation taught by Jeff McBride

- Pianistic Ergonomics taught by Edna Golandsky

> nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.

That is an excellent way to trick yourself into thinking that you learned, when really you got fed bad information. LLMs are nowhere near reliable enough to use for this topic and probably never will be.

I guess it depends on what you ask an LLM to teach you. For certain subjects, I've found them to be a pain in the ass to get right.

For instance, I was hoping that I could use GPT to help me learn to fly a B737-800. This is actually less challenging than people think... if you just want to get in the air and skip all proper procedure and safety checks! If you want to fly a commercial plane like a real pilot, there is a ton of procedure and instruments to understand. There is actually quite a bit of material on this available online via flight crew operations manuals, as well as an old (but still relevant) manual straight from Boeing. So why rely on GPT? It's a bit hard to explain without rambling, but those manuals are designed for pilots with a lot of prior knowledge, not some goofball with X-Plane and a joystick. It would be nice to distill that information down for someone who just wants an idiot's guide to preflight procedure, setting the flight computer, taxiing, taking off, and performing an ILS landing.

Sadly, it turned out I really had to hold the LLM's hand along the way, even when I provided it two PDFs of everything it needed to know, because it would skip many steps and get them out of order, or not be able to correctly specify where a particular instrument or switch was located. It was almost a waste of time, and I actually still have more to do because it's that inefficient.

That said, I still think LLMs can be unreasonably good for learning about very specific subjects so long as you don't blindly believe it. I kinda hate how I have to say that, but I see people all the time believing anything Grok says. :facepalm: GPT has been a big help in learning things about finance, chemistry, and electronics. Not sure I would assume it could create a full blown course, but who knows. I bet it'd be pretty solid at coming up with exam questions.

Considering hallucinations, that seems risky. How do you double check what you were taught?

I don't know much about Coursera, but Udemy has always been quite bad since I remember.

Most drawing/painting courses are taught from people who are juniors at best. The quality is laughable compared to what you can get for free from Marco Bucci/Sinix/Proko channels. And honestly, even those high-quality videos won't teach you how to draw anyway.

That being said, I didn't realize how bad Udemy art courses were when I got started. I think that's a life lesson for me especially in the era of LLM.