Obviously, AI isn't an improvement, but people who blindly trust the news have always been credulous rubes. It's just that the alternative is being completely ignorant of the worldviews of everyone around you.
Peer-reviewed science is as close as we can get to good consensus and there's a lot of reasons this doesn't work for reporting.
I think we're on the same side of this, but I just want to say that we can do a lot better. As per studies around the Replication Crisis over the last decade [0], and particularly this 2016 survey conducted by Monya Baker from Nature [1]:
> 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility found that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiment results (including 87% of chemists, 77% of biologists, 69% of physicists and engineers, 67% of medical researchers, 64% of earth and environmental scientists, and 62% of all others), and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments.
We need to expect better, needing both better incentives and better evaluation, and I think that AI can help with this.