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Comment by tmhn2 | Hacker News Reader

At issue is the fact that it doesn't typically work like: mathematician produces a proof in isolation, generates a PDF, and shares it with a bunch of people. There's a whole culture and community going on behind the scenes with conferences, seminars, lectures, chats in the hallway, advising students, etc. that AI-generated proofs bypass.

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I don't think that AI would disrupt any of that. Even if AI solves a problem, you can still discuss the methods at conferences, seminars, lectures, chats in the hallway, advising students, etc.

Tao’s key point is that the way people are using AI today does disrupt that. Because people and companies are valuing the results over understanding. So we’re getting slop results rushed out that are automatically verified.

Moreover in the past, discussion and idea sharing would happen naturally to overcome the friction of the process. But now when OpenAI is stuck on a particular part of NS for example, they can just throw more capital & tokens at the problem.

I won’t speak for Tao. But it is not “people” who have valued the result over understanding. “People” are a bit impressed that the machines are as good or better than the priests who have been praying at the inscrutable altar of pure mathematics. But it is mathematicians—I am speaking as a mathematician—who have adopted a culture of valuing results over exposition and transparency. The field has been rife with extremely opaque papers for many years and the character of research participation has been one of exclusion and competition over proof priority at the expense of understanding and transparency. It is unbelievably ironic to listen to mathematicians complain about “AI slop” when they have built careers upon human “slop” if slop means papers crammed with technical density that prevents all but specialists from reading the work.

I don't think that's entirely fair.

I think it's OK that there are some materials designed for a specialist audience, and some materials designed for a wider audience. Technical density serves a real purpose in the former (I'd like to just say "stack" without including an explanation 10 times longer than the rest of my paper about what a stack is and why we are talking about them), and some people expend a lot of effort on the latter (think lectures, lecture notes, textbooks, seminars, blogs, etc--totally appropriate to dig into the motivations here).

It's just the fact that it's a really vertical field, not some cultural failing, that results in pretty opaque stuff sometimes.

Scale the problem down to an email. You're saying AI won't disrupt writing an email, when the text is vetted and authored by a person. True!

But now let chatGPT write lengthy emails unrestricted and now no one wants to read your slop anymore. That's what is being advocated against.

Hopefully that's true. Instead of bypassing the community maybe it stimulates the community. I think it does disrupt things a bit, but I'm optimistic at the moment!

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