I was once a chatGPT user. I never paid for the service omg no, but I did try it out and wrestle with it and try to make it teach me new things, even though I was always very skeptical that this would be useful.
I had it help me out with ideas for games I wanted to design, programming stuff I wanted to learn about and that sort of thing.
Results were mixed. I did manage to sometimes churn out some functional python or javascript or what not, but what I noticed is that unless I knew exactly what I needed to do it would essentially give me nothing that worked. So I had to go elsewhere to learn everything I could before I could know how to write the best prompt to get the result I wanted, which… by then I didn’t need the prompt anymore. And it was like this for every subject.
I tested it against things I knew pretty well already and it was always the same. The thing is that there are better tools out there for almost every application, so really if you’re using an LLM to try and learn some things, you should ditch the LLM and just go through the documentation. Go to the library, get some pointers from a real human librarian. Ask a teacher. Audit a class in your subject.
LLMs are just simply not good at anything, except for generating reasonable sounding Lorem Ipsum. And that’s the story of how I no longer use them for anything except filler text.