This is to @MarxMadness@hexbear.net as well.

The AI does provide a bibliography for its claims, so if I want to dig in as more serious research, I can do so - with the caveat that I'll need to use machine translation.

AI can't replace our own critical capacity and its answers should always be treated with skepticism. In my experience, modern models are mostly accurate when reporting raw numbers, but they make all kind of stupid and weird comparisons, like columns of a table where none of the items align in a meaningful sense.

What it can do is act as a useful tool to access bodies of information that are otherwise essentially impossible to make sense of. I'm never going to Chinese university education in Marxism. How else would I begin to penetrate the vast body of Chinese Marxist scholarship? From here, if I want to draw any meaningful conclusions, I need to see the answers from AI as about as reliable as a wikipedia article (including imperialist liberal bias). But now I have a useful collection of sources and a decent summary of the subject that would otherwise be beyond my reach.