Don't live a cognitively sedentary lifestyle
If you want to improve your cardiovascular fitness by riding a bicycle, you need to push your body to do some work while pedaling yourself around. You can't just sit back on a Class 2 E-bike and roll on the throttle without ever turning the pedals. Both approaches might get you from one end of the bike path to the other, but it should be obvious that the point of the activity isn't just to traverse the bike path. The point of the activity is to stress the heart, lungs, and leg muscles so that a physiological adaptation will occur over time.
Similarly, if you want to effectively learn a complex subject, there's no way to avoid doing cognitively demanding work.
Methodically working through every detail of an example, struggling through dead-end attempts to apply new techniques, and carefully articulating how new concepts fit into your existing knowledge framework might feel mentally draining and uncomfortable, but the cognitive strain is the point! It's what drives the learning! This strain is what forces the adaptations that build intuition and retain knowledge.
When you use a tool like Google's NotebookLM to produce topic outlines, fully worked exercises, mind-maps, or even an AI-generated 15 minute podcast conversation on a topic(!), you've done the cognitive equivalent of zoom down the bike path on a Super73 electric motorbike. Even if the AI output is high-quality (which is rarely the case), just consuming what it gives you won't have a substantial benefit. Creating or using these artifacts isn't the point. The point is to engage deeply with the learning material in a cognitively demanding way.
The marketing of AI products and many of the AI enthusiasts on the internet seem to assume that the best way to use these tools is to turn to them as soon as we experience difficulty in any situation. But I hope it's obvious that, if the goal is to learn things, that isn't a viable approach. That's living a cognitively sedentary lifestyle.