It's so discouraging hearing all about Watson and health for past X years and then reading AI insider articles refuting the work as total bullshit and a PR job to keep IBM relevant today.
Don't know why this would be any different.
IBM did build a computer that could play jeapordy. But being able to play jeapordy doesn't tell us how good any of the subcomponents are at, e.g. understanding doctors notes/journal articles.
The same thing goes here, they built a system that can debate with some ability. Can it be used to spot fake news as a researcher says? Maybe some subcomponents could be reused for that, but there's no guarantee that they will be good enough for that task either.
You really have to take modern AI at face value and not extrapolate from what it actually does to anything else, otherwise you will whipsaw between optimism and cynicism.
This was a demo that IBM could synthesize a plausible argument that supports or refutes a given assertion. That's interesting and a bit impressive (presuming its argument isn't simply a regurgitation of some position paper it found online). But without understanding cause and effect, its arguments will remain very superficial, probably driven by a small catalog of argument 'frames' (templates) that adaptively fill a handful of slots like [needs] [means] [goal] [conflicts] and [emotional hooks]. Using such simple recipes it can produce verbiage that plausibly sounds humanlike, but isn't actually reasoning. It's likely that the system couldn't even diagnose help desk problems using basic logic, e.g. backtracking to thise dependencies that might have caused the given outcome, thereby identifying only the possible and plausible causes.