It implies agency on the part of the software that doesn't exist. It should really just say "researchers ran some math calculations and found X." The fact that the math runs on a computer and involves the use of functions that were found by heuristic-guided search using a function estimator, instead of human scientists finding them from first principles, is surely relevant in some way, but this has been the case for at least a century since Einstein's field laws required the use of numerical approximations of PDE solutions to compute gravity at a point, probably longer.
I don't want to say there is no qualitative difference between what the PDE solvers of 1910 could do and what a GPT can do, but until we don't need scientists running the software at all and it can do decide to do this all on its own and know what to do and how to interpret it, it feels misleading to use terminology like "AI" that in the public consciousness has always meant full autonomy. It's going to make people think someone just told a computer "hey, go do science" and it figured this out.
I don't want to say there is no qualitative difference between what the PDE solvers of 1910 could do and what a GPT can do, but until we don't need scientists running the software at all and it can do decide to do this all on its own and know what to do and how to interpret it, it feels misleading to use terminology like "AI" that in the public consciousness has always meant full autonomy. It's going to make people think someone just told a computer "hey, go do science" and it figured this out.