https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/116855445718992437

How are your fertile inspirations coming to life? With work you can create something solid, but I get one or two emails a day from people trying to invent new theories of physics with the help of AI... almost all of which are nonsense, because they don't know enough physics.

We are aware of malice because it is a common failure mode in cooperative endeavours, especially in childhood when people have not learned to manage strong emotions like jealousy.

Humans develop internal complex predictive models of not only their environment in general but of the behavior of other humans. We default to modeling others at our own level of competence.

Which makes modeling toddlers extra hard, because we desperately need to model them, but they are nowhere near our level of competence.

Both toddlers and robots often seem "maliciously compliant". They do *precisely* what you ask, especially when that's not what you intended.

Of course all humanity has maliciously compliant trickster legends. Anyone with children would love those stories.

Having actual mastery (deep integrated understanding or skill) without effort would be great.

Delegated mastery is just another word for having helpers, or using a tool. You can buy mastery of others and tools, but you can't buy the judgment that comes from deep understanding.

That's why AI supercharges subject matter experts, but can cripple novices. It's a great junior assistant, but needs someone with judgement to boss it around.

That is a very apt metaphor!

Here's a recent article by Gowers:

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/a-recent-experience-with-chatgpt-5-5-pro/

But you don't think this will all turn out to be hype, like in other fields?

Maybe every time we met another group of humans or other hominins who thought differently about the world, negotiations with them were complicated.

At some point people will be forced to realize that there's much more to math than proving things. But will this happen before or after lots of mathematicians get fired?

Because some people here have been talking about an "abundance of proof" caused by these text generators.

I definitely see it as a game. Or a set of games, really, because one of the fun parts is changing the rules and seeing what that new game will be like.

... but I don't see how an LLM can do any of that.
It's not a brain, it doesn't understand what it intakes, and it can't even follow rules : it only apes randomized parts of the (stolen) corpus it's working from.

So either, examples of success are
1) cherry-picked from an ocean of failures
OR
2) actually failures that have been manually reworked in entirety

...unless something makes math very different from every other field we've seen trampled by the GenBS so far.

Nonmathematicians often don't realize that the hard part is figuring out what theorems are worth proving.