My take on it is that even if there was no "novel" discovery (leaving that up to the reader to define), if you consider human knowledge to be a sphere in N-dime

My take on it is that even if there was no "novel" discovery (leaving that up to the reader to define), if you consider human knowledge to be a sphere in N-dimensional state space, "within that surface area" is Swiss cheese, and AI seems to at minimum be able to fill in some of those holes. And those hole-fillings, for all intents and purposes, look to us like novelty, even if much of it was simply overlooked by us, or, perhaps, unable to attain due to time or other constraints. Now if you want to talk beyond the sphere, let's call it the "novel novel discovery of the unknown unknowns", then you may have a point, and AI may be more limited than humans in discovering the things that we don't know we don't know. Especially the as-yet-unmodelable things i.e. intuition. Plenty of discovery left just working from first principles, however. Which I cautiously suggest current frontier AI is good enough to model to a significant enough extent that it is useful for discovery.