Science News Is Bullish on AI. Scientists Aren't.

Science press has always had a structural incentive toward the breakthrough frame — the single discovery, the named tool, the before-and-after moment. That incentive is amplified when AI is the subject, because AI coverage in general has been optimism-forward since the AlphaFold moment gave journalists a concrete win to anchor the narrative. What the NPR study on AI helping individual scientists introduces is a distinction the breakthrough frame structurally cannot hold: the tool that helps a researcher move faster through a narrowing question is not the same tool that advances…