Strong disagree. One of my favorite use cases for LLM chatbots is to satisfy random niche curiosities whenever they cross my mind and get pointers for further reading. This often leads to going down some niche rabbit hole and learning some interesting stuff in the process.

Whenever I tried the same with Google in the past, more often than not I couldn't find what I was looking for, because I didn't know the correct keywords to search for in order to start getting relevant results. With ChatGPT & co. I can just pose the question in natural language, get results and continue exploring.

A couple of weeks ago I was interested in how people have interpreted the Tower of Babel narrative over time, so I used Claude to do a bunch of research to identify interpretations over time and look for historical trends. I don't think it "solved" anything, and it all felt more curiosity-driven. It led to a bunch of in-person conversations and followup questions.

So I guess I'd say it's more about how you're using the tool and what kinds of problems you're looking to solve with it. A calculator can be dinged for getting effortless answers at every turn or it can be praised for enabling a higher volume of solved math problems and enabling more complex work for a broader set of people.

It gets me past the non-productive barriers and allows me to explore problems and scenarios I could never have done before due to impossible to justify time cost for myself and expense for my clients.

That's a deeply cynical way of seeing things. Grabbing a book to search for an answer is no different than being told the answer is on page 153 line 6 by someone else. It's about what you as an individual is seeking from the activity.

If you're just copy-pasting answers and you don't internalize what is being said, sure, you're not being curious or more importantly, learning. This DOES NOT mean that every person who engages with an LLM is doing that or doing it every time, and just like using a search engine or grabbing a book can lead you into interesting rabbit holes, so can an LLM, it's just a matter of how fast and to want end.

The real issue is the hallucinations which for people unfamiliar with said topic, can lead them into believing what they're being told is a fact when it's not. Also LLMs like leaving out URLs and sources from their replies to save on tokens often if you don't remind them, that's also annoying.

This whole discussion is bunch of anecdotal evidence, which is fair, and as such I'll give my own. I've found myself engaging more with obscure topics that interest me via the LLMs than I did with a search engine because the barrier is lower. I don't have to sieve through horribly designed websites filled fluff that doesn't interest me, many with dozens of JS trying to run (UBO + noscript thumbs up) and in some cases demanding that certain JS run just for me to see some plain text, some slow to browse with topics hidden under sub-sub-menus. It's annoying and just one of many barriers. Others being language. etc...

Speak for yourself. Looking at my LLM chat history, about 90% of my questions are focused on understanding systems better, not having it solve a concrete problem for me.

Do you never click through to the sources or experimentally test the information presented to you by the LLM? If not, who's stopping you? To me, this seems a bit like a tenured academic complaining about the abundance of research assistants working for them preventing them from properly understanding things anymore.

I think it just changes the level where you spend your thinking.

You think things like "is the accordion a better user experience than the side tabs" instead of "why the f is the third accordion pane empty?"

Sure, the curiosity of figuring out where you made the mistake is gone, but that was never very valuable. It's just a detour that forces you to be curious about something else.

It can enable people to go directly to solutions, but it also enables alternative paths. AI may not be nurturing creativity where it is not present but it doesn't seem to be responsible for people's disinterest in anything beyond their immediate need.

The real problem is that most people either don't see the value in or don't have the time to indulge in their curiosity. Even the language we use, indulgence to describe scratching that itch. How funny. Because curiosity is a luxury.