I think a better analogy might be to computer security. Script kiddies exist. You don't necessarily need to do a lot of research if you can learn to use open source tools. It won't be state of the art, but that's not necessary to do damage.

These days there are a lot of high school kids messing around with machine learning. They might not have the theoretical understanding, but I don't think it will require a graduate degree to get there.

I'm not sure why there aren't more hacker tools that apply machine learning? Maybe we're not quite there yet.