[ducktective]

>that there's no daylight between the works of an individual who has taken a literal lifetime to hone a skillset and any random dilletante armed with the appropriate AI tools.

Well, the promise of AGI and current LLM trajectory looks like this is how it's going to be. This is part of the reason that juniors or university students feel animosity towards LLMs.

Have you looked at the recent prompts mathematicians use to disprove conjectures? One of the last ones related to graph theory was basically: continue research...enough partial results, give me a breakthrough...

Not exactly skillful prompting...