Yeah, and with 95% of those videos, there'll be something they gloss over which I don't understand; or I'll have a concern which they don't address; or, conversely, they'll assume that their target audience was born in the 15th century, and spend 20 minutes building up the context, when what I really needed was about 12 seconds.

With an AI, I can say "I don't understand that part, can you explain more?" Or "what about this concern I just thought of", or "I already know almost enough about this, I just need this one gap filled in." It's an objectively better experience.

When I was a kid, if I didn't know how to spell a word and asked the teacher, a common answer was to tell me to look it up in the dictionary.

As words in a dictionary are sorted alphabetically rather than phonetically, this is unhelpful.

YouTube videos have the same kind of problem, in that you can only easily find the video explaining which dielectric unions suit your problem when already know what those are (to use an example that I had to ask ChatGPT for because I have no plumbing experience even if I did know about galvanic corrosion and therefore immediately understood why they're important once I saw the name).

You can also hopefully find user and service manuals online.

In 2009 or so a projector at some event that needed one wouldn’t start, and I noticed it was flashing a pattern, so I found a computer and internet connection (both very slow), painfully found and downloaded the manual for that model, and identified that it was saying the fan wasn’t starting. Lo and behold, a strut was broken and obstructing the fan blades, and bending it out of the way fixed it, and the event was able to begin.

I’ve found manuals for a drawbar organ, multiple digital pianos of different ages and brands, AC split systems, and more. Manuals are good stuff. They don’t cover everything, but they’re very useful.

For these sorts of things, AI is doing approximately nothing for you: you would do better (and learn more!) finding the actual manual, or you’ll want to see someone doing the thing in a video.

The bar for finding them is higher, though.

Tbh, I think people feel more comfortable asking an AI. Even though I “know” it’s all smoke and mirrors, I still prefer the human-like interaction to the grind of watching video after video and building my own understanding.

OOPS… there you see how it’s going to end. I’m the meatspace button-pusher.

But now you have a even larger problem that the initial problem you were trying to solve: trying to sieve thru millions-of-hours of just slightly tangential videos trying to find the specific video fragment you need.