No I'm fairly certain it was invented and that this style of breathless science fiction roleplay will be looked back on as an embarrassing relic of the era.
I'd personally be very sceptical that the human brain could derive much meaning from smell beyond "smells bad don't eat" or "reminds me of something", but I guess I would have said the same about creating smells via ultrasound so what do I know.
> In a sharp peak, micro optimizations would give you a clearer signal where the optimum lies since the gradient is steeper.
I would refuse to even engage with the piece on this level, since it lends credibility to the idea that the creative process is even remotely related to or analogous to gradient descent.