When (not if) AI does make a major scientific discovery, we'll hear "well it's not really thinking, it just processed all human knowledge and found patterns we missed - that's basically cheating!"
I saw the phrase "goalposts aren't just moving, they're doing parkour" recently and I do love that image. It does seem to capture the state of things quite well.
Less that AI is cheating and more that we basically found a way to take the thousand monkeys with infinite time scenario and condense that into a reasonable(?) amount of time and with some decent starting instructions. The AI wouldn't have done any of the heavy lifting of the discovery, it just iterated on the work of past researchers at speeds beyond human.
It sounds like you're saying AI is just doing brute force with a lot of force, but I can't imagine that's actually what you think, so would you mind clarifying?
I think both can be true - I'm pretty sure a lot of what it is viewed as genius insight by the public, is actually researchers being really familiar with the state of the art in their field and putting in the legwork of trying new ideas.
When (not if) AI does make a major scientific discovery, we'll hear "well it's not really thinking, it just processed all human knowledge and found patterns we missed - that's basically cheating!"