Five sources report the same detail, so you write it up as confirmed. Then you look closer. Two of them cite the third. The third cites a post that has since been deleted. The last two ran the same wire copy. You had one source, not five, and the one source is gone.
I spent 20+ years as an intelligence analyst, and this trap has a name: circular reporting. It catches smart people constantly, because agreement feels like proof. What surprised me when I started using chat assistants for research is that they fall for it too. Ask ChatGPT or Claude to research a company and you get a confident, fluent answer. Ask where each claim actually comes from and the confidence quietly falls apart.
You do not need a smarter model to fix this. You need a prompt that makes the assistant do the checking instead of just talking about it. Here is the one I use, in full. Paste it into whatever assistant you already have, then paste your sources where marked.
Screen the material below for circular reporting and signs of deliberate
disinformation. Be concrete, cite which source you mean, and do not
