To me it felt like knowledge creation, but maybe someone had already published a similar scheme and then someone had published a similar attack and ChatGPT was pattern matching on that and adapting it to my setting. That seems very likely because while I was working in RSA, the fix to the attack is very similar to the use of a nonce in Schnorr signatures and for the same reason.
I feel like compressing knowledge and being able to answer questions about the knowledge, with the ability to explore “what if” differences seems more like it suggests real understanding. And that’s what these LLMs can do.