Good point. Look at patents. Few are truly novel in some exotic sense of "the whole idea is something never seen before." Most likely it is a combination of known factors applied in a new way, or incremental development improving on known techniques. In a banal sense, most LLM content generated is novel, in that the specific paragraphs might be unique combinations of words, even if the ideas are just slightly rearranged regurgitations.
So I strongly agree that, especially when are talking about the bulk of human discovery and invention, the incrementalism will be increasingly in striking distance of human/AI collaboration. Attribution of the novelty in these cases is going to be unclear, when the task is, simplified something like, "search for combinations of things, in this problem domain, that do the task better than some benchmark" be that drug discovery, maths, ai itself or whatever.
So I strongly agree that, especially when are talking about the bulk of human discovery and invention, the incrementalism will be increasingly in striking distance of human/AI collaboration. Attribution of the novelty in these cases is going to be unclear, when the task is, simplified something like, "search for combinations of things, in this problem domain, that do the task better than some benchmark" be that drug discovery, maths, ai itself or whatever.