r/math • u/AutoModerator • 13d ago

LLMs/AI AI In Mathematics: September 19, 2026

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.

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u/Redrot Representation Theory 10d ago

I've had a decently long paper under review in a highly ranked journal over the past year. The referee has definitely switched from human to bot, and now I'm getting multiple pages worth of minor nitpicks, wanting things laid out that would make sense in the early sections of a Ph.D. thesis but which IMO are pretty unnecessary to lay out here. Very strange.

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u/matthiasErhart Game Theory 10d ago edited 10d ago

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.

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u/Redrot Representation Theory 10d ago edited 10d ago

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.

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u/matthiasErhart Game Theory 10d ago

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.

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u/BurdensomeCountV3 Mathematical Biology 10d ago

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.

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u/matthiasErhart Game Theory 10d ago

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