As you correctly point out, fact checkers, Media, and search engines are not to be trusted. In fact, everyone states opinions / facts according to their knowledge / viewpoint. If I use DDG for search, then they fall back on Microsoft's Bing search and their algorithms. AI is no different, except it can give a short authoritative sounding answer that will be accepted by people who "want to believe".
If I want to know what the maximum tax write-off for mutual fund losses in the USA is, a chatbot is likely to give me a pretty good answer, the same as a standard tax preparer.
Hopefully, AI will help make people more skeptical. Until then, it answers very well about 2/3rds of my search queries. For example, I was wondering about a plugin called linkify for joplin. I entered Joplin linkify in youchat and found out it was a setting not a plugin. Here's what they said. It might not always be right, but I thought it resolved my question.
Joplin uses a feature called "Linkify" to convert text that looks like a URL into a clickable link [1]. This feature is turned on by default and can be disabled in the settings. Linkify also supports other protocols such as FTP and email, so any text that looks like these protocols will be automatically converted into a clickable link.
- Clickable URL links not working! - Support - Joplin Forum
Clickable URL links not working!Markdown Guide | Joplin
https://joplinapp.org/markdown/Linkify the editor - Plugins - Joplin Forum
Linkify the editor