Long, long time ago (1999, before LLM's) I made a virtual museum exhibit creator for education. The collection explorer created a connected graph where the nodes were the works of art and the edges were based on commonalities from their textual descriptions. It used very rudimentary language technology so it 'suffered' from things like homographs. Rather than being seen as a problem, the users liked the serendipity it brought for ideation.

I assume free but not random association could be a comparable support for ideation in research.