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My response to both of your points is the same. Unless you specifically prompt them otherwise the output from frontier models is always very hedged, which is why it half agreed with MKC without being willing to really fall on one side. You're taking a hedge as disagreement, in reality it neither endorses nor disagrees with MK, which is a fine null hypothesis. Where it doesn't hedge and outright states something is false or true it's pretty trustworthy unless you have strong evidence.
Zvi calls this concept bounded mistrust and it applies to all media sources. They can mislead but almost never lie.
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