Comment by dudeinjapan
1 day ago
The issue here is not AI--it's academic papermill culture and paywalled journals.
AI gives us greater freedom to "stop and smell the roses", explore hidden structures, etc in mathematics. It is a dream come true for curious minds.
Yes. AI is a useful tool and we are going to adapt and use it.
The phd student will be forced to publish 10 breaktrough articles, the university department which does not offer "free" access to AI (for its members) will see the its ratings going down, when compared with the other universities.
It will be "use AI or perish" for academic management so on the side of academic management the ones with vision will thrive and the ones without will perish.
But what about the publishers? In the last decades the academic research was made into a feeder for publishers. The main goal of a researcher is to write articles, which are later sold back to other researchers.
This economic system is under big stres now, because for a while at least the academic management and publishers will have contradictory goals.
And that is why this scare which is induced by those who profit the most from the present system.
Academia can work fine with open access conferences and Arxiv preprint as machine learning and computer vision and other computer science fields show.
Arxiv is a good blueprint for what we should build on. Terry Tao gave a recent talk about how "canonicalization" is the key bottleneck. The limitation of Arxiv is that is non-canonical, non-peer reviewed. However, there is no reason that journals should have a monopoly on peer review (it should be noted that peer reviewers aren't even directly compensated for it, granted it is supposedly "priced in" to academic salaries.)
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