Mathematicians are unhappy about OpenAI

Mathematicians are unhappy about OpenAI. The gist of their argument is that they form a community that trains young people. When AI started producing breakthroughs on hard mathematical problems, I asked what a very smart 17-year-old would feel. Do you still choose a math major and train yourself to prove difficult results by hand? This crisis has been coming for a long time. When I was a kid, the four-colour theorem was proved by a computer, in 1976. An intense debate followed. Does it count as a proof? I wrote my PhD thesis using symbolic algebra software. To my knowledge, nobody then would publish their scripts. I tried to include mine. I was told it would make me look bad. The letter says: "In recent months, the success of AI in solving major mathematical problems has made headlines even outside mathematical circles. But solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight. Forgetting this in the world of AI may turn the tool against the primary goal. Often these solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others. As in all creative professions, this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions. We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work, with misalignment between the outcome of the use of AI and its initial purpose.

In many fields and activities, years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas." They worry that kids will not choose to become old-school mathematicians. That is a reasonable fear. They do not seem to consider that some kids might still do mathematics, just in a very different way. Doron Zeilberger, in 2009: "Teaching computers how to discover and prove mathematical results is certainly the way to go, and I believe that mathematicians who continue to do pure human, pencil-and-paper, computer-less, research, are wasting their time." sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opin… The letter implies that people, because of AI, will stop having ideas, or will stop taking the time to understand the issues. If that were true, mathematics would continue only on computers, with no humans interested, or it would stop.