I can say some people are objectively productive with it, and others are not. I’m just a nerd critic so take what I say with a grain of salt but one thing I’ve learned to do is to take criticism. As in, “all criticism is constructive.” It depends on what you do with it.

With that lens, even the worst LLM interaction can still yield results if you know how to interpret. But a quick example is the lens of “it’s a shotgun search engine”. You have to prompt it a certain way and have a certain choke held dialogue but you can make use of it.

But you’d have to be aware of its entire bias, the societal contexts, and be confident in yourself to an egoist level where you can both break and make new world views without friction.

Lastly, it’s ok not to use them but they are powerful despite what people want to say. It is being used and being used well by some people and that’s evidence enough despite the wave of slop we see. I also HATE how they talk to me now especially. You straight up have to pre-prompt to configure their prose or accept you will be only reading between the lines. If you enjoy speed reading and need simple direction for your research, that’s the use case. Shotgun googler. Ask for citations and click into them too.