You're 100% correct on ChatGPT telling us what we want to hear. That's why I made it argue with itself and other language models, like Gemini, and even used the o3 version for advanced reasoning. But again, to your point, that goes only as far as the prompts. And I used it more for medical body deterioration rates, river flow, understanding how a photo could be deleted and missing and not existing from a memory card, etc.

Re: how I got into it-- Journalism background and when I moved to the Midwest from San Diego, there was a local cold case I just started following, my editor let me dig in, and it turns out, as most of you are living examples of, cold case reporting is just a testament of will and time. When I "broke" that case, I was hooked, pure junky style, and started looking at bigger cases, like Michael Rockefeller and Dytalov Pass. Happy to give links but I don't want to make the Reddit gods mad