Comment by david-gpu
10 hours ago
Tao's critique of AI in the field of mathematics reminds me of what French art critic Charles Baudelaire said in the 19th century about photography [0].
Baudelaire argued that photography became a haven for failed painters, the sorts of hacks that could not finish proper training. Photography, as a mechanical rendering of the world, could only record what already existed; it couldn't transform reality the way a painting could.
He also criticized the public's craze for "rushing" into it, and complained that this technical "progress" was weakening the arts.
Do you see some parallels as well?
[0] https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Curiosit%C3%A9s_esth%C3%A9tiq...
I have listened quite a few interviews with Tao and I see him being very careful about criticizing AI. He very often emphasizes the usefulness of it. Where he is critical has a lot of merit. One of the points I clearly remember him saying that having AI be able to solve many of the open problems, regardless of how important there are (there are many open problems that are not that important) greatly reduces the problem space for mathematics students to give new problems to work on.
In a parallel thread omnicognate correctly pointed out that for AI companies it's a direct commercial loss to pour all this money into bruteforcing the solutions to these problems, and that a lot of times the solutions by themselves are not directly commercially valuable. They are doing it for stock price, trying to lure in private capital in preparation for IPOs.
Their models are good, but they are not the moat because Chinese models are good too, so what they are doing, in my opinion, is more harm than good. Mathematics is a science by humans for humans.
> One of the points I clearly remember him saying that having AI be able to solve many of the open problems, regardless of how important there are (there are many open problems that are not that important) greatly reduces the problem space for mathematics students to give new problems to work on.
The crux of the argument perhaps. It suggests that too many people are currently studying mathematics without making much progress.
>I have listened quite a few interviews with Tao and I see him being very careful about criticizing AI. He very often emphasizes the usefulness of it.
This is tiresome. People should be able to flat-out criticize AI without the implied need to justify themselves all the time or "be careful". Its almost like AI has a trillion-dollar agenda backing it, to the point that you have to add a careful "its really great! But there's this little issue..." for any criticism.
Even those who are very pro AI should have the intellectual honesty of admitting that there are very valid reasons to criticize AI.
Based on the amount of low-effort criticisms out there, clearly nobody is afraid of "big AI". Tao seems careful about his critiques of AI because low-effort off-the-cuff criticism can lead to all sorts of future problems/hypocracy.
1 reply →
Both of Baudelaire’s criticisms were reasonable, and the same thing happened again when AI image generation showed up. You think the opponents look ridiculous because you’re viewing the history from the winner’s side. As for “the public,” people had a real demand for photography as a way to record things, which is also why it won. There is no comparable public demand for proving Fermat’s Last Theorem.
I think there's a difference between "photography will change art--we need to be ready" and "photography will change art, therefore stop photography."
There is no doubt that AI has changed the practice of mathematics, just as it has changed the practice of software engineering (and will soon change almost every intellectual job).
Trying to deal with change by saying, "please stop the change" is foolish, IMHO. Mathematicians need to redesign the discipline with AI in mind. But I get that it's easy for me to say that and hard to actually do.
Genuine Art versus Mechanism, from 1901, (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25505621) is another article that I read a few years ago that other people might find interesting.
Are you aware that Tao is among the largest proponents of using AI in mathematics? The usage itself is not the point here.
Tao doesn't go as far as Baudelaire, but there are some similarities. In particular, Tao has criticized that AI is not being used to create new interesting conjectures, and that the rush to prove old conjectures is not giving human mathematicians enough time to carefully analyze and understand the proofs and the methods used in those proofs.
My answer to both is the same: nothing stops mathematicians from doing both of those things, with or without the help of AI. And we all understand that it will take time to do that. But complaining about the dawn of a new era of advancements seems counterproductive.
> But complaining about the dawn of a new era of advancements seems counterproductive.
you completely misunderstood the critics. your analogy is awful. this is much closer to the industrial revolution in the uk: it brought a lot of progress, but also extreme inequality and concentration of power.
12 replies →
People aren't ready to discuss AI assisted imagery as art yet. Most discussions lack the nuance that Baudelaire lacks in that critique, which deals with the nature of art and the importance of human intention and input.
Wasn’t the criticism of photography kind of correct though? I don’t think people think of photography as an art as much as painting is an art. There aren’t a lot of photographs that a layman couldn’t in principle also take, but only a few people could replicate a good painting.
It's not exactly correct. Photography is just as much an art, but it's a very different medium and pieces are judged differently.
Realism isn't difficult, so critique shifts towards composition, narrative, context, process, and emotional impact.
Taking a clear photograph is easy with modern equipment, which means the bar for what's considered "good" is high.
i think that's just you
I don't think the analogy works because for the past few years Tao has been one of the most vocal advocates of AI in mathematics and has used it extensively in his own research. You can find several of his talks about this on YouTube. It's completely consistent to believe two things at once, that the tools are useful and that the companies are misbehaving.
Keep in mind that his critique is very recent, and likely applying to a specific use of AI, as opposed to AI as a whole. If you've been following his Mastodon account, he's been happily using LLMs for math purposes for well over a year.
He posted about using ChatGPT to transcribe PDFs when it first became popular. So he’s been enthusiastic about LLMs for a while.
Indeed. As Nassim Taleb says, "Something bad for the (existing) class of mathematicians as they lose their privilege, but not necessarily bad for mathematics & our body of knowledge?" https://xcancel.com/nntaleb/status/2098498124419305639
I'm really tired of these arguments (this and "it's just like calculators").
Photography decimated other forms of visual art, so the concern wasn't wrong. But AI threatens the entirety of human intellectual endeavors. I can make do without oil paintings in my home. I'm not sure I want to live in a future where we make do without brains.
Humans still have brains (and thus human intellect) even in the presence of AI... Even today, people make varying use of their brains.
But what use will be their brains to others if a machine can do the thinking instead for a fraction of cost?
Lots of people still make bad music that other people still manage to enjoy (a lot of it has gone multi-platinum!) even though they're not Mozart or Bach.
This would be valid if we didn’t live in under capitalism, which reduces the way we spend our time down to dollars and cents.
you can still get oil paintings in your house. you just arent willing to pay for actual art
Had me until the last word. Cameras did take away oil paintings, but not eyes.
It did. While you're busy recording an "instagramable" moment, you are not entirely enjoying that moment. Your eyes are on the screen, not on the subject.
In a way, if photography is an ersatz for painting that eventually made imaging available for the masses, then AI could become an ersatz for thinking. But it feels like I'm paraphrasing TFA.
What will happen when AI companies have spent their advertising budget on math problems and whatever else gives the maximum wow effect for the bucks? Probably customers hooked on the vain satisfaction of spending token$ to impress friends.
We can start having a meaningful discussion when people use real reasoning instead of analogy.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49664505
Analogy is a meaningful way to discuss. Drawing parallels can illustrate a point and bring up nuances by pointing out where it falls apart.
You don’t have to participate in the discussion, but it will take place regardless of your preferences.
[dead]
Baader–Meinhof phenomenon:
Baudelaire popped up in this article two days ago.
https://www.noemamag.com/a-new-kind-of-creative-poverty/
The AI people sing from the same sheet.
It’s not a parallel. No one ever claimed photography to be the same as painting or some other medium - it was a new medium that wasn’t respected.
AI is being treated and pushed as a replacement for every medium.
It literally was a replacement for portraits.
[dead]
Wonder what would've Baudelaire said about generative art as in diffusion-based imagery.
If he didn't understand photography, he wouldn't understand the nuance there either.
Photography vs painting is the first thing that comes to my mind when I listen to AI critics.
We can’t look back with perfect hindsight because both the past and present have deeply ingrained blindspots. They don’t know what it is like to live in a world with perfect edges. We don’t know what it is like to live in a world with no edges. We can read about someone who proclaims that “something will be lost”. We will just think “but I have no need for any of that.” But we don’t even know what it is.
No, there are no parallels. It is just cliche propaganda used by AI boosters.
Wait, what? Who’s the ai booster in this scenario?
Beaudelaire