This is a bogus analogy leaidng to a bogus conclusion.

If something points to the needle in the haytack (saying "this haystack has a needle positioned eighteen centimeters from the top and three left of center"), it's much easier to verify that indeed there is a needle there than it would be to find that needle in the first place.

If an LLM spits out a claim that something happened (citing a certain article), it's less work to read the article and verify the claim than it would be to DISCOVER the article in the first place.

In other words, LLMs can be a time-saving search engine, and the idea that it's just as much work to find+verify information as it is to have the LLM find it and then you verify it is hokum.