You don't need AI to fool people who can't understand a scientific article yet will trust its conclusions.

True, but AI significantly increases the throughput and ease at which it can be done.

He received the Turing award for his work on neural networks; no big deal.

I thought it was "he received the Turing award for Schmidhuber's work on neural networks": https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/critique-turing-award-bengi...