Could this very article have been written simply by applying some model to the paper text? I doubt it. Look at it, it's full of quotes from the authors, full of

Could this very article have been written simply by applying some model to the paper text? I doubt it. Look at it, it's full of quotes from the authors, full of commentary and explaining the context to a lay audience (with a healthy dose of self-promotion from the side of the university). Although research papers do contain some context (on a more specialized level, and with many references to other papers instead of repeating the idea), they are more about the technical approach, which is less useful for direct use in the popular article. One goal of popular science writing is to inspire people, to tell us why we should be excited about a topic, to see what's going on in fields distant from ours etc. This is far from "research paper in -> pop sci article out". TL;DR: Summarizing a research paper is not the same as writing an interesting pop sci article about a research project.