alt Hacker NewsOne thing I don't yet understand and would appreciate an opinion from a professional mathematician is: are we okay with mathematicians that outsource the discovery of new theorems to AI while providing verification services themselves?
For instance, imagine a mathematical institute that hires reasonably competent mathematicians who are amazing AI prompters but lack mathematical creativity or "genius". All they produce are mathematical papers with clear proofs and explanations. Very human readable stuff. But the catch is that they are not discovering any of it. All they are doing is "translating" full AI discoveries into a format others can understand.
Is that acceptable?
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So do you care more about the way someone solves a problem or about result(the fact that it solves it)? For a student I think the answer is obvious because he has to understand the basics but for a researcher we don’t ask bio researcher to do research with pen and paper alone, do we or just using some deep thinking. AI is a tool. Get over it. Math is not an art.
Former pro mathematician here. There's a big divide amongst mathematicians right now. Some like the idea of going full steam ahead with ideas like this, and others are dead-set against it. There's even "The Association for Human Mathematics" [1] which believes in human mathematics and not using AI at all.
The central problem is that the majority of people go into math because they love discovering mathematics and want to participate in the process. That itself is a huge part of the reward. That creates the community. Simply have huge numbers of people outputting math as if it were an industrial factory kills the joy in the process and so in itself destroys the community.
So in short we're seeing a dichotomy between the "problem miners" who are simply hooked on producing results and mining them and "explorers" for lack of a better term.
There's one thing you've got to keep in mind - mathematics, in reality, is mostly useless in the sense that most discoveries these days will always be useless. What is useful generally is teaching, and applying mathematical abstraction to more realistic problems, a skill that you mainly get from dicovering generally useless stuff. (Math for art's sake.) That's how math works, or at least worked before AI. Once you put AI in the mix, it messes up all the incentives....
Personally, I'm 100% anti-AI because I think there's not much point in simply discovering new things if it's not primarily a human journey. It's revolting to have solutions generated by machines like that.
1. https://www.ahmath.org/