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Comment by nialv7 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why the author could claim this is "their" proof, and they kept saying "they" did this, "they" built that. but in reality everything is done by the LLM and the author is merely asking it to do things. i guess they did contribute money at least...

> Me: btw how’s your mood overall?

LOL. mood??

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Author here! My impression is that it's customary in the mathematical community to take responsibility for the result with your name, regardless of whether it came from LLM etc (as long as you disclose LLM usage). I am perfectly fine calling it "LLM's proof" or somehow else, but it's "my" in the sense that "if there is a mistake in it, it is my mistake".

Dude you’re so far removed from understanding anything about what the math community thinks. Just stop this nonsense. This is not “your” result.

What do you want me to call it? I'm fine calling it your result if you want.

It’s nobody’s result what is wrong with you?

I apologize to Dan Abramov for venting my frustrations about things outside of either of our control and unfairly using him as a punching bag. He seems to be an intelligent person and I hope he continues learning mathematics using whatever tools he sees fit, including AI. It was wrong of me to do this and I will take a break from this website for one week.

Someone had to choose the problem, steer the model, and check the output - it's clearly taken a lot of time. That's authorship with a powerful tool, same as it's always been.

I don't understand your comment. At first it seems like you think the LLM should get credit for the work. But then you mock the author for asking about the LLM's mood, which makes me think you believe the LLM is just a tool and not capable of receiving credit (FWIW I would agree.)

Just saying (as an author) I don't believe that LLMs have conscious experiences, but the word "mood" was a good languagespace anchor for the kind of information I wanted to get out of the LLM at the time.

not mutually exclusive.

author provided nearly no intellectual input into solving the problem, so they IMO don't deserve credit. and it doesn't make sense to anthropomorphize LLMs and talking about their "mood". these are two unrelated statements.

as to if you want to give the credit to the LLM, or if you believe nobody gets the credit, is another separate question.

If there is consensus on how to attribute credit for LLM-solved human-steered (with no mathematical human input) proofs, I am happy to follow that consensus. Do you have a concrete alternative recommendation? What should I change?

You’re conflating two ways of understanding “credit”. One version is what the tool gets, an honest description that the tool solved it. The other is a concept used in the math community to divvy up job opportunities.

Jobs will come and go. I'ts their nature. What makes you treat job over pursuit of knowledge. It is lowly and unbecoming.

There’s not going to be anyone to understand the pursued knowledge when this job gets killed off, which means you’re supporting the reduction of knowledge. That is what’s “unbecoming”.

This job based pursuite of knowledge is impure. Drop it.

Do you understand anything about how the career works, or are you just cheering on the death of things you don’t understand?

I cheer for a path that opens up the future wider for knowledge.

That knowledge won’t be accesible to people who haven’t trained in understanding mathematics. This is just a fact about the human mind. By killing off this profession you will be making it almost impossible for a large number of people to attain that.

I don't think I am.

Probably because you don’t actually know how the culture of mathematics maintains the capacity for humans to learn mathematics.

When you use a drill to put a hole in the wall, do you take credit for it, or do you credit the drill? Without intent, a tool, whether it be a drill or an LLM, is just an inert object.

They still needed to invest time and other resources into this. It's listed clearly in the 2nd paragraph. Mathematicians, or anyone for that matter, don't figure out everything from scratch. They lean on the work that others have done before them to save time. How is this any different?

LLMs need a lot of help to get to any kind of complicated proof, really. And yes, they get in moods. I spent 3 weeks trying to prove something and frequently had to try and convince Claude that it wasn't impossible and that it could really do it.

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