Earlier quoted context omitted.
uhhh can it? I've certainly not seen any evidence of an AI generating something not based on its training set. It's certainly smart enough to shuffle code around and make superficial changes, and that's pretty impressive in its own way but not particularly useful unless your only goal is to just launder somebody else's code to get around a licensing problem (and even then it's questionable if that's a derived work or…
You have to realize AI is trained the same way one would train an auto-completer. Theres no cognition. It’s not taught language, grammar, etc. none of that! It’s only seen a huge amount of text that allows it to recognize answers to questions. Unfortunately, it appears to work so people see it as the equivalent to sci-fi movie AI. It’s really just a search engine.
In fact, I would expect it to be able to reproduce past human discoveries it hasn't even been exposed to, and if the AI is actually capable of this then it should be possible for them to set up a controlled experiment wherein it is given a limited "education" and must discover something already known to the researchers but not the machine. That nobody has done this tells me that either they have low confidence in the AI despite their bravado, or that they already have tried it and the machine failed.