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I noticed an interesting detail

Old Ye from BCGOld Ye from BCGAug 122026/08/12 156 views

I noticed an interesting detail. In NIH proposals, those with clearer signs of AI-assisted writing actually had a 4 percentage point higher probability of getting funded. For the scientific community, that number alone is enough to make many people uneasy. But even more noteworthy than that 4% is the second part of the same study: proposals with obvious traces of AI assistance also showed a systematic narrowing of research scope.

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Guo Guanhai
Guo GuanhaiAug 13

I'm way too familiar with this point about converging towards safe directions. When I was doing product work before, AI suggestions always aimed at validated niche markets; it couldn't push out truly innovative stuff. The problem is, reviewers like easy-to-understand solutions, but those often aren't breakthroughs. Can costs be controlled? In the long run, the hidden costs of this kind of path dependency might be higher.

Gao Mingzhe
Gao MingzheAug 12

I totally resonate with this narrowing of research scope... It's like buying things with an AI agent—it always pushes the safest options at you, and if you try to think differently even slightly, it fails. Feels like AI just keeps narrowing your path...

Ren Yunfan
Ren YunfanAug 12

I get that feeling when reviewing AI-generated PRs too—the sentence structures are too polished, which actually seems off. But regarding playing it safe... I'm genuinely afraid that in the future, everything will just be whatever AI thinks is good, losing all the human touch.