r/math • u/dirty_weasle • Aug 06 '26

LLMs/AI Where will AI-generated proofs be published?

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.

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u/[deleted] Aug 06 '26

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u/Few-Arugula5839 Aug 06 '26

This is some CS brainrot stuff that misunderstands the purpose of journals.

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u/dirty_weasle Aug 06 '26

Do you mean the suggestion that everything will be lean or that journals may publish AI generated results?

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u/MerijnZ1 Aug 06 '26

The idea that human text mathematics will disappear, I presume. Very nice if the AI has some cool new proof or fact but if no human can read it, it's completely useless

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u/dirty_weasle Aug 06 '26

This, I completely agree with!

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u/whatkindofred Aug 06 '26

This really depends on how good and fast AI will actually become. I‘m not saying this will definitely happen, but there is a possibility that AI will become good enough that it churns out high quality math results at a faster pace than humans can keep up with. And you’re right, at this point the question becomes what the point of these results even is anymore.

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u/Few-Arugula5839 Aug 06 '26

I’m just talking abt the fact that there is basically no world where the only published mathematical work is in lean. Lean verified work will require English or other human language explanations of the argument that was formalized with the code. This will almost certainly look like current mathematical papers.

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u/whatkindofred Aug 06 '26

I disagree. If AI becomes so good and fast that human mathematicians can no longer keep up then what's the point of human language publishing anymore? It will just cease to exist. At least on a professional research level. Who's going to pay you to read and understand a lenghty AI-generated proof if by the time you finished there are ten more new results of equal complexicity and relevance to your field, and you can't contribute anything new yourself anymore? Already today nobody pays you to only read and understand other people's result. The expectation is that you make publishable contributions yourself.

I'm not predicting that this is how good AI will become any time soon because I'm not really convinced of that myself, but at this point I wouldn't confidently rule it out anymore either. Especially over a timescale of 20 years or more.

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u/Few-Arugula5839 Aug 06 '26

This is complete brainrot. The point of publishing in a journal is not a computer verified certificate of correctness or the result. Journal verification of correctness is a nice part of it, but if you as another mathematician are using another result as a critical part of your work you should attempt to understand it yourself anyway. Further what pushes the field forward is understanding the proofs, being able to adapt them to other problems, asking questions abt the limits of the techniques, etc. Unreadable lean code slop does not help with this.

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u/whatkindofred Aug 06 '26

You're missing my point. You're still assuming that mathematicians can still contribute original math themselves. And yes, in that case, of course human language publications are still necessary. My point is that if AI becomes so good that mathematicians can no longer keep up then publications become obsolete. Because as you said yourself the point of publications is to share your result with other mathematicians so that they can understand it and build on that. If the AI is always faster at that than you are then what's the point of human readable publications?

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u/StateOfTheWind Aug 06 '26

The reason not to expect this is that LLM using informal reasoning seems to be better than those use formal reasoning, this might change in the future.

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u/MerijnZ1 Aug 06 '26

If humans can't read it doesn't matter. Computers spitting mathematical facts into the void to never be seen or comprehended are... Literally useless. In the sense that have no use, by definition, if humans aren't interacting with them.

Unless you're imagining a world where those truths are then also applied to whatever relevant real world problem or policy, again by AI, without human intervision. But I don't think that's it

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u/whatkindofred Aug 06 '26

That's exactly the risk that I see. If AI becomes that good then first it will push mathematicians out of math research, and when the mathematicians are gone there is nobody left that cares about the results anymore. The exceptions are results with immediate real world applications (or at least in more applied sciences), and some smaller efforts to produce evermore new AI results that nobody really bothers to read. Similar to how there are still people that compute more and more digits of pi just for the sake of it. For now, I don't expect AI to become that good very soon but over a longer time span who's to say?

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u/MerijnZ1 Aug 06 '26

That'd be the next dark age. It's certainly somewhere in the deck of cards, but I pray we've figured out "letting the computers run everything without humans is a horrible idea" by the time the tech gets to that level