> also makes people believe they understand more than they do, because every answer comes so easily to them. But the LLMs are easily steered and tend to agree with what you want them to say.

Well agree to disagree but my load bearing claim is that a lot of "effort" that the original people put are mostly useless. If you can get information without having to do that effort, you haven't lost anything. For example an archivist finds an 18th century spoon or something and he went through a lot of bureaucratic hoops and logistics to get it. After getting hold of the spoon, you and him are on the same epistemic level because the logistics added ~0 to the truth.