[foxes]

Im really not motivated by this argument; it seems a false equivalence. Its not merely a spell checker or removing some tedium.

As a professional mathematician I used wikipedia all the time to lookup quick facts before verifying it myself or elsewhere. A calculator well; I can use an actual programming language.

Up until this point neither of those tools were asvertised or used by people to entirely replace human input.

[ekidd]

There are some interesting possibilities for LLMs in math, especially in terms of generating machine-checked proofs using languages like Lean. But this is a supplement to the actual result, where the LLM would actually be adding a more rigorous version of a human's argument with all the boring steps included.

In a few cases, I see Terrance Tao has pointed out examples LLMs actually finding proofs of open problems unassisted. Not necessarily problems anyone cared deeply about. But there's still the fact that if the proof holds, then it's valid no matter who or what came up with it.

So it's complicated I guess?

[sodapopcan]

I hate to sound like a 19 year old on Reddit but:

AI People: "AI is a completely unprecedented technology where its introduction is unlike the introduction of any other transformative technology in history! We must treat it totally differently!"

Also AI People: "You're worried about nothing, this is just like when people were worried about the internet."

[mikkupikku]

The internet analogy is apt because it was in fact a massive bubble, but that bubble popping didn't mean the tech went away. Same will happen again, which is a point both extremes miss. One would have you believe there is no bubble and you should dump all your money into this industry, while the other would have us believe that once the bubble pops all this AI stuff will be debunked and discarded as useless scamware.

[foxes]

Well the internet has definitely changed things; but also it wasnt initially controlled by a bunch of megacorps with the same level of power and centralisation today.