At what point does delegating source curation to AI reduce output quality?

There is a clear difference between using tools to condense your own curated notes versus letting a prompt pull and synthesize arbitrary web data. When you control the input sources you avoid hallucinations and surface-level analysis. But when you hand over both search and synthesis to software critical context often gets lost in the process.

What does your actual workflow look like when diving into a completely new topic or industry research?