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The difference is that the act of writing a book is a type of knowledge generation/curation/distillation that Socrates didn't know about.

I don't think the act of writing prompts for an LLM advances thinking/cognition in the same way.

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I am fairly certain Socrates knew about books, he just wasn't literate himself. But literacy was quite common amongst Athenian citizens, it was sort of an outlier for the time. Of course most of the day-labor was done by slaves, but it afforded them the time for cultural pursuits and healthy debate, and Socrates was very much a product of that.

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