pretending the only way anybody comes to a conclusion about anything is by reading peer-journals is an absurdly myopic view of epistemological practices in the real world
Nobody is pretending that's the case...
your argument was that it's laughable on its face that anyone should be more skeptical of one claim vs another a priori
No, it's that it's hypocritical to make a bunch of unfounded claims and then whine that someone who is conducting actual research and trying to be objective isn't doing it well enough or whatever.
To say that anyone who says they are more productive with ai is making an unfounded claim is evidence that you believe you that the only path to knowledge is formal research, which you claimed to not believe.
Paste this conversation into ChatGPT and have it explain what I said because I just can't be arsed to correct you any longer.