> There is no way we can know if Google is lying because there's no way to check. It should be assumed that every example has been cherry-picked and post processed. It should be assumed that the data used to train the model (if one was trained at all) was illicitly acquired. We have to start from a mindset of extreme skepticism because Google now routinely makes claims that cannot be demonstrated.

This doesn't sound like a productive stance for science. You don't trust their result? It's fine to ignore all the claimed artifacts and you can just take the core idea. You don't have to assume anything malice to invalidate their so-called advertisement.

While this kind of stance might make you feeling a bit better, but will also make your claim political and slow you down if it happens to be true, given the history that many of Google's papers eventually have become a foundation of other useful technologies even though almost of all them didn't contain reproducible artifacts.