When using a gitlab token generated for a project or group, rather than a personal access token, pull requests are generated in the name of the token, rather than the real author's name.
It looks like a token can act as another user via the sudo property https://docs.gitlab.com/api/rest/authentication/#sudo. This property should (probably?) only be provided if the user is using a project or group token, so perhaps the UI should have the user select what kind of token they are using via a dropdown before providing the field. It looks like extra permissions might need to be granted for the sudo feature to work, so users would need to be informed about this.