Verification on its own is not research, but judgement is research.
"Hey, Prove something a machine can't", sure I can't, "Hey, Say something worth proving & judge it well", ah, now I might have a few unique observation/ideas/curiosities/problems from my having being a human.
Imo, the feeling of intelligence or the process of originality(originativity) test for ai is subjective & is coming down to 4 paths: novel relative to a reference class, valuable within a domain, counterfactually sensitive to internal state and environment, and revisable through learning.