I still can't understand all the details, but it's very interesting to read that chat. Anyway, instead of close to lore laundering, for me it's "standing on the shoulder of giants".
IIUC the idea is that of most "discoveries" by AI were actually a better bibliography search. I agree with that.
In this case, in the link you posted, it looks like the AI or the human pick an almost solution and made the AI tweak it until it got a real solution. I'm not sure if the tweak is an usual one or brute-forced or something in between. I should ask one of my friends that work in Algebra.
Tao's post is more about understanding the new result than guessing how it was found. The chat with Clause is more iluminating.
I'm mostly replying to your "standing on the shoulders of giants" part, when in some cases, the giant is the work you did in the past and forgot about :)