> The same way Wikipedia can be used for research

Before LLMs, Wikipedia was the greatest source of disinformation in human history. No journalist should ever have been using it for research. At best it's a fun project for satisfying people's idle curiosity where the truth of what they read doesn't really matter, but if your job is to report factual information, reading Wikipedia is doing a disservice to yourself and your readers. Just like people don't properly verify the BS LLMs fabricate, very few people thoroughly read the citations on Wikipedia, which often involves purchasing books and getting access to research papers. If they did read citations, they would realise that Wikipedia citations are all too frequently unsupported by the actual material they're citing, or in some cases, the cited material establishes the exact opposite. This is to say nothing of cherry-picking sources, of course.

> Should they also ban them from talking to people as sources of information, because people can be misinformed or actively lie, rather than instead insisting that information found from such sources be sense-checked before use in an article?

Statements made by people are attributed to those people to account for this. Rather than saying "Company X's product is the safest product ever made", a journalist says "Company X's CEO claims their product is the safest ever made". People do not do this with LLMs or Wikipedia, rather than attributing it to an understood-to-be-unreliable source they just present it as a factual statement. Also, if the journalist has good reason to believe the quoted statement is false, it is in fact journalistic malpractice to cite the quote wholesale without caveats informing the reader of the evidence that the quoted person is trying to mislead them.

> because everywhere where potentially dangerous equipment is actually made available for someone's job you will find policies exactly like this

Which maybe makes sense when the flamethrowers are a necessary part of the job. Flamethrowers are not necessary for journalism, full stop, so the fault rests with the organization introducing a dangerous tool into the work environment unnecessarily.