Again, the authors never said anything about language models. That's entirely on you.
Philosophical discussions aside, it is entirely possible for current AI to use concepts (but the research they are describing does not employ that kind of AI).
I also think most lay people seeing the term AI are likely to think of something like ChatGPT.
It is a) literally incorrect what they write, and b) highly misleading to a lay person (who will likely think of something like ChatGPT when they read the term AI). Why are you defending their poor writing?
Because that's how language works - it's inherently ambiguous, and we interpret things in the way that makes the most sense to us. Your interpretation makes no sense to me, and requires a whole host of assumptions that aren't present in the article at all (and are otherwise very unlikely, like an AI that can literally work at the level of concepts).
> Why are you defending their poor writing?
I'm defending them because I don't think it's poor writing.
A: a grammatically incorrect statement, saying that "the AI used theory", when they mean that "the AI's design can be understood using theory" (or more sloppy "that the design uses the theory").
B: a grammatically valid if contentious-to-you statement about an LLM or knowledge graph based system (e.g., something like the AI Scientist paper) parsing theory and that parsing being used to create the experiment design.
As I have explained, B is a perfectly valid interpretation, given the current state of the art. It is also valid historically, as knowledge graph based systems have been around for a long time. It is also the likely interpretation of a lay person, who is mainly exposed to hype and AI systems like chatGPT.
Regardless, they a) introduce needless ambiguity that is likely to mislead a large proportion of readers. And b) if they are not actively misleading then they have written something grammatically incorrect.
Both findings mean that the article is a sloppy and bad piece of writing.
This particular sentence is also only a particular example of how the article is likely to mislead.
Anyway, I don't think it's reasonable for me to ask you for evidence here, so let's just agree to disagree.
Out of curiosity, are you familiar with work like "the AI Scientist"? Having an LLM based AI suggest experiments based on parsing scientific literature is not outlandish.
Examples of people being confused:
rlt: The discovering itself doesn’t seem like the interesting part. If the discovery wasn’t in the training data then it’s a sign AI can produce novel scientific research / experiments.
wizzwizz4 in reply: It's not that kind of AI. We know that these algorithms can produce novel solutions. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04258, specifically "Urania".
About a quarter of the comments here I just have to assume what definition of AI they're talking about, which changes the meaning and context significantly.