The research community is in uproar after OpenAI released a trove of more than 700 mathematical preprints entirely generated by AI on 6 October. The San Francisco, California-based maker of ChatGPT posted the preprints on the software repository Github.
Although some mathematicians celebrated the solution of longstanding problems, others took to social media to complain about being scooped. Some were incensed at what one physicist called a ‘slopocalypse’, even if the mathematical content could end up being formally correct.
Ok, but literally all it does is steal human work and provide an output.
I wonder how the mathematician expected it to go. Was he expecting to be directly provided the AI output so he could publish it? Was he going to care if the AI used a novel approach he hadn’t employed and was unable to identify where it got it from? We have seen since the beginning that AI has an attribution problem, so it seems like his actual concern was that HE wasn’t credited.
I’m not an AI supporter, but this whole “it did just a small part” complaint is weird to me. I believe I read that most were solved in 3 hours of compute. I’m sure the mathematician wasn’t just 3 hours from solving the problem. It did it faster than humans did. Isn’t that the point? Does it matter how little the step was if it hadn’t been taken yet? It could’ve taken mathematics years to make that last step. Shouldn’t we be excited to see this development? If we’re going to have AI, isn’t the point that it accelerates problem solving. If AI sped up life saving medical research by years or even just months by doing one last step, would people be having the same reaction?
I’ve seen the same people complaining about this regularly talk about using AI for coding. Why is it ok that so many companies have put programmers in this position, but all the sudden it’s bad for mathematicians?
the former has just been normalized and tech bros are hard at work trying to normalize the latter, but it’s not ok in either case