Insights

You may be familiar with Marshall McLuhan’s communication theory of "The medium is the message."

What he meant was that the way we share something can change the meaning of it. Take television, for example. When news moved from print to TV, it didn’t just speed things up. It made crime feel more urgent, more personal, more ever-present. That shift changed public opinion. Not because the facts changed, but because the medium did.

Now, the new medium is AI. And it’s reshaping something we care a lot about: how we communicate science.

AI isn’t just a handy writing tool. It’s an algorithm that decides how things are said, what gets repeated, and what gets left out. It tends to be confident, polished, and... often a bit samey.

That sameness is where we lose our edge. It gets harder to tell one discovery from the next, or to trust that there is a real expert behind the message.

Here’s what I’ve noticed.