My rebuttal to that is twofold:

First, the discussion is about about news, not science (nor about general LLM behaviour).

Second, and probably more relevant, I explicitly said 'if they have a source, go analyze the source rather than taking their interpretation at face value'. When I wrote that I was thinking specifically about what I assume is your point, which is how often news articles about scientific discoveries or science news can often miss, misunderstand, or exaggerate the point of the original research, sometimes to the point of being as useful to society as celebrity gossip.

> And there are plenty of scientific topics which have major impact on policy. Maybe we need to take certain decision out of the hands of the scientifically illiterate.

I would be in favour of mandating that governments make decisions based on established scientific fact rather than the vibes they wish existed, restricting the decision making to 'how do we react to these facts as a society' and not 'which facts should we imagine are true to justify the policies we want'.

> PS The BBC (which would be in your highest level) has had to retract stories so often over the last 3 or 4 years that it became a meme to have them apologize for being wrong because they didn't know some video source came from a ML model.

Aside from being a good reason to support AI fingerprinting on generated media, this is covered by my existing point:

"consensus across publicly-funded news outlets"

"the idea should be to analyze consensus across multiple sources with different biases and agendas. Don't trust any one story from any one source, but look for multiple stories from multiple sources and synthesize results from that"

If the BBC reports on something because they got duped but they're the only ones who did, then there's a distinct lack of consensus which is my main argument in my post.

Lastly, and this is generally off-topic, but at least the BBC issues retractions (which LLMs could then also consume and use in their results). There's a lot of 'news media' out there that will happily parrot talking points they wish were true, or blindly report what they're told, but have no interest in publishing retractions after they push falsehoods, deliberately or not, to their customers.