I'm stupid and everything is written by AI

I am sure everyone has noticed this. You google something to learn about it, find a medium/substack or even an independent website that looks very nice on the surface, but as you keep reading the super familiar AI prose seems very apparent.

Did they just get a chatbot to generate all the text? Did they generate their own text and just use the chatbot for formatting and grammar? Or is that just their natural writing style? I am stupid, I can't tell.

But this type of text is everywhere now. You either ask an AI to explain it to you or read something someone else "wrote" which still just sound like an AI explaining things to you. Having an AI explaining something to you isn't wrong, it's just that by their very nature LLMs cannot fact check, they are not concerned with the truth. They don't even know what 'truth' is. Their job is to present you with an 'average' of all the text they're trained on that most closely matches your query - so you can argue it is likely to be true assuming most of the training data regarding your specific query comprised the truth. It's hard to even verify from multiple sources because THEY ALL SEEM TO BE AI GENERATED meaning technically even though you are going to multiple websites to check you are actually still checking with only one source.

If this is concerning a subject I know about, I can figure it out. But if not, if it's something I'm starting with 0 knowledge in and am trying to understand basic concepts, sure maybe even if it is AI generated text it's probably correct and gives me a good starting point. But where do I go after that? I don't know, I'm stupid.

One obvious answer I guess is the library. Take not of a whole bunch of things you have questions about, go to the library, find multiple books that may answer your question, trawl through them to find if you are lucky, an answer that's adjacent to your actual question and you infer the rest. It's actually an amazing system, we did that for centuries. Its an incredible way to learn and figure things out yourself while also having enough guidance that you aren't completely lost. But goddamn is it time consuming, and probably not encouraged in today's work environment where you are expected to produce results really fast. A lot of us stopped doing this after the internet.

The other I'd argue even simpler solution is just to ask someone else. Find that one guy who does know about this stuff and just ask your questions. Even if they don't know the answer they'd definitely know where to look and that would speed up your searching tremendously. This is what I always used to do. But I feel like now 'AI' has become a stand-in for the guy you'd go to. There's also a major social stigma around asking what might be perceived as a stupid question. It's not at all unreasonable to think that you'd much rather ask an AI your 'stupid' questions than ask a coworker and have them think you are incompetent (they probably won't, but the possibility is enough to dissuade most).

What do you all do? What's your favorite way to learn today? How does one get around the 'everything seems AI generated' issue?