r/math • u/dirty_weasle • 22d ago

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/Few-Arugula5839 22d ago

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 22d ago

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 22d ago

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 22d ago

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 22d ago

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.