I’m a scientist. I need to say this because the AI hype is getting ridiculous. AI can design a molecule in seconds. That doesn’t mean it discovered a drug. It discovered something we scientists have never been short of: Something to test. Someone still has to make it. Run the experiment. Measure whether it works. Check whether it’s toxic. And ultimately prove it works in the real world. AI hype tells us: “Prediction is discovery.” “Simulation is experimentation.” “Generating a molecule is developing a drug.” It isn’t. AI is making ideas incredibly cheap. But every new idea creates something AI cannot generate: Evidence. And the more hypotheses AI produces, the more experiments we’re going to need. That’s the irony nobody seems to be talking about. AI may not make laboratories obsolete. It may make them more valuable than ever. You can speedrun the thinking. You can’t speedrun reality.

I’m a scientist. Every time I hit “post,” I hesitate. Not because I doubt the science. But because I know what’s coming. I know someone will call me a shill. Someone will tell me I’ve been bought by industry. Someone will explain my own field to me after watching a 90-second video. Someone will demand a source, then reject the source because they don’t like who funded it. And someone will confidently tell thousands of people that I’m lying. That is the strange reality of communicating science online. You spend years learning how uncertain science can be. Then you enter a world where the most confident person in the comments often knows the least. But I keep hitting “post.” Because if scientists decide that communicating science isn’t worth the abuse, the people with the least hesitation get to explain science instead. And that seems far more dangerous.

Imagine you were a foreign agent working to undermine America. What would you do? Weaken public health. Undermine trust in vaccines, medicine and science. Weaken agriculture. Spread fear about food and agricultural technology. Make food harder and more expensive to produce. Drain military resources. Encourage conflicts that burn through weapons, money and attention faster than they can be replaced. Destroy trust in institutions. Convince people that scientists, doctors, universities, regulators and journalists are all lying to them. Then divide the population. Make Americans hate each other more than they fear their actual adversaries. And finally, destroy the idea of objective truth itself. Flood the information space with so much misinformation that nobody knows what to believe anymore. The result? A country that is poorer, sicker, more divided, less secure and less capable of responding to a crisis. You don’t need to defeat a country from the outside if you can persuade it to weaken itself from within.

Misinformation doesn’t give you control. Pseudoscience doesn’t give you freedom. Conspiracy theories don’t make you a critical thinker. You can’t make informed decisions with bad information. Good decisions start with good evidence.