Maybe yes. If you give it phrases from, say, the last five years' worth of published research papers, and it combines phrases at random and spits out the words

Maybe yes. If you give it phrases from, say, the last five years' worth of published research papers, and it combines phrases at random and spits out the words, yes, in that there will be some interesting research ideas, and maybe even some that a human would not have come up with. Unfortunately, they'll be buried in a blizzard of stuff that no human would come up with, because they are totally meaningless combinations. Finding the good ones is the issue - and it's not an issue that LLMs can currently solve.