People will be depressed because they spent decades getting into professorship positions and publishing papers with ostensible comprehensible interpretations of the generative processes that produced their observations, only to be "beat" in the game by a system that processed a lot of observations and can make predicts in a way that no individual human could comprehend. And those professors will have a harder time publishing, and therefore getting promoted, in the future.

Whether ML models produce hypotheses is something of an epistemiological argument that I think muddies the waters without bringing any light. I would only use the term "ML models generate predictions". In a sense, the model itself is the hypothesis, not any individual prediction.