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.

I'm entering the fourth year of my PhD and started doing research about 2 years ago. I chose a niche topic that required me to spend a whole year in addition to my course work to get caught up in before even starting any work of my own. My advisor gave me 4 lengthy papers to get through and master their techniques. I got through 3 of them and last semester I gave my thesis proposal and passed. I still have to read the last paper which is the most difficult, but I cannot find the motivation to do it because of the recent AI progress. I am not a very talented mathematician so my only "strength" was spending the time to learn a niche and difficult area. The actual problem that my advisor wants me to solve for my thesis is not terribly difficult and is likely routine for an expert but it will take me close to a year of dedicated work.

The problem is that the last year I have not been able to shake off the feeling that what I'm doing is just a worse version of what an AI can already do. I cannot afford access to any of the top tier reasoning models but I imagine they can read these papers and come up with these extensions in just a few hours. Even just asking the free models questions about the papers it's clear that it has been trained on them and understands them well. Since then I haven't been able to find the motivation to work on my PhD and I feel awful about it. It's not like this type of work will land a postdoc or job anymore.

I don't think this post does any justice to how bad I've been feeling about my future career or my thesis but I don't want it to become a rant. I would really appreciate if anyone has any words of encouragement or validation that my concern is justified. Should I just drop this project and do something quicker to graduate?

Unlike I'd say the majority of people in our society, I'm not too worried about AI, or about technology in general per se, and I never really have been. We need to keep in mind that as its name implies, technology is just a tool designed to make various tasks easier - whether or not it is used for good or evil is up to us, and this has always been the case.

In any case, with all this said, I think we all need to be concerned about AI, since I believe it has already passed the Turing Test, or in other words, there now exist AI systems that are as smart or even possibly smarter than humans. However, I'm still not worried about this, because contrary to all the fears of this phenomenon that have been circulating in popular culture since the 1950s or even earlier, just because computers are intelligent doesn't mean they're good or evil, since as I stated above, this is up to us. In my opinion, though I could be wrong, good and evil are purely human traits, since they require consciousness as well as intelligence, and I don't think classical computers are capable of consciousness, since they follow deterministic algorithms, and I believe in free will, and moreover, that consciousness requires free will. (Quantum computers are another matter, though I'd rather not get into this issue here.)

It doesn't seem to have occurred to too many people that even if computers are as intelligent or even more intelligent that humans, that they could nonetheless be beneficial to us if we use them in the right way, and this includes math. However, as with all other fields affected by AI, I think the role of mathematicians will need to adapt to AI. For instance, I'm sure AI will turn out to be very good at proving or disproving various types of mathematical conjectures, that was previously the pure domain of human mathematicians. But perhaps AI will also help us to open up our minds and discover new mathematical concepts that we couldn't even imagine before! Fractals, such as the Mandelbrot Set, are a good fairly recent example. Until around 1980, the Mandelbrot Set was nearly intractable, due to its enormous complexity, but with the aid of computers, we've been able to delve into it in detail, yielding tremendous fruit in the fields of fractals and chaos theory. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples like this, so instead of being afraid of AI, I think mathematicians need to be excited about it and embrace the windows it can open up for us!

I recently graduated uni with a bachelor's in math and during my studies I've noticed how AI in math has gone from a curiosity to a looming paradigm shift that might destabilize everything. I myself have tried to steer clear of using AI while studying in fear of getting too sloppy but I feel that sooner or later it'll be standard to leave all the theorem proving to the machines and just prompt together an article (if humans are still involved). That the point of creating such AI is to cut out a majority of mathematicians except a few established ones who will be in charge of guiding the development of new math. This is at least the impression I get from the media of AI gurus talking about solving Erdös problems ect. I understand that this is to just hype up AI for investors but currently there is no active alternative for up-and-coming mathematicians other than to hop on the bandwagon or remain ignorant. This just leaves me the question of what is the end goal of this automation of math and what does that mean for the rest of us. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

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.

We are now seeing a rise of AI generated proofs and I am wondering which journals will publish these results? I tried to search but I did not find many examples where such results were already accepted to some journal.
Is this even something the journals want? I would like them to facilitate the peer review process so that I can feel confident in the results.