AI Did Not Make Grant Proposals Worse. It Made Them Average.

A PNAS paper published August 11 looked at confidential NSF and NIH proposal submissions from two large research universities, plus every publicly released award from both agencies. Higher language model involvement was consistently associated with lower semantic distinctiveness, positioning proposals closer to recently funded work within the same agency.

Not sloppier. Not less rigorous. Closer to the middle. In a funding system, that is the more expensive failure, and it is the one nobody was watching for.

Today's post walks through the bimodal split, the NIH and NSF asymmetry, and why the model returning the center is the design working correctly rather than breaking.

Read it: https://www.harvestkernel.com/ai-grant-proposals-not-worse-just-average/