But in this case, isn't use of llm / generative ai to tackle new frontiers just another instrument to be used to understand the universe?

An engineer picks up a telescope, and uses it to build new applied technologies, a scientist uses the data it produces to answer new mysteries.

No one's saying, "we have to be careful with the information the telescope produces".

It seems to me that all of these hundreds of proofs we've seen recently are glorified academic exercises, whose purpose is curiosity for its own sake without any practical application, or we'd already hear about at least one of them being implemented to some gain somewhere. It's all woefully unimpressive. It's not like anything stops mathematicians from trying to find more elegant solutions to their machine solved pet problems, since that's what they were going to try and do anyway despite it being completely pointless in practice.