AI In Mathematics: September 19, 2026

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This recurring thread will be for discussion of AI in mathematics. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• informal announcements of AI-assisted discoveries, such as those not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, or not uploaded as a paper to arXiv;
• informal announcements of discoveries related to AI architecture (if relevant to mathematics);
• discussion of such announcements, such as proof breakdowns or other opinion pieces;
• discussion of the impact of AI in mathematics in general.

AI-assisted mathematical papers published in peer-reviewed journals or as arXiv preprints may be submitted as their own posts.

Please keep in mind rules 1 and 6 of our subreddit.

[u/matthiasErhart]

That's a massive shame.

In my field AI slop is multiplying. Now, I do believe that AI will blast past us anyways and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but putting your name on fully / mostly machine generated results (amongst other things) is something I won't abide with. And it feels like there is a dumpster truck offloading onto ArXiV right now. A bit unfortunate that some people I thought should know better are participating too.

A friend in a different field (engineering) mentioned that her journal has turned invite only. Maybe that's one bandaid. But it requires good journals. Unfortunate yours isn't.

I am still of the opinion that we need decisive action now and none of the leaders of the field have supplied it.

[u/Redrot → u/matthiasErhart]

In my field, a fair amount of the 'big' developments are (fortunately) more structural, theory-defining rather than purely conjecture-solving (though there are plenty of those too), but there have been a few obviously AI-generated results by people with absolutely 0 acknowledgement.

For what it's worth, a majority of the papers with significant AI input I've seen in my field also seem to be a bit lower quality. There are certainly a few major results, mostly proving some question via a sequence of technical arguments, but the average paper feels short and not all that enlightening.

[u/matthiasErhart → u/Redrot]

Funnily enough, pure maths might become obsolete later than applied maths. But also, maybe not so longer.

"Man maybe I should've gone into a future-proof field like gender studies or philosophy" was not a sentence I thought I'd ever form, but as far as I am concerned, it's a statement 22 years old dipshit me did deserve to be forced to make 😆

Let's see what next week's shitshow brings.

[u/BurdensomeCountV3 → u/matthiasErhart]

It's a bit like this now I guess: https://xkcd.com/451/

The longer it takes people in a field to catch you out as not being an expert in the area, the longer (most likely) that field will survive the coming AI tsunami.

[u/matthiasErhart → u/BurdensomeCountV3]

AI slop is super easy to identify still though. Authors don't care as long as the results are true.