Unfortunately, this is a general issue in reporting, whether it is scientific or not. It is difficult to get people interested in nuance, in incremental changes, so flashy headlines are the norm. This is a difficult problem to solve though ...

The vocabulary we use to talk about these issues is also very important : when you hear "Artificial Intelligence learns how to read", there is an implicit tendency to associative all the cognitive functions that are associated with "Intelligence" and "reading", leading people to believe that there is some basic sentient being that has actually learned to read. This is of course completely wrong : a machine learning algorithm was able to make sense (find correlations) between a big fat set of numbers. Very cool indeed but there is no sense of meaning or purpose for it.