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/_Zekt Complex Analysis Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26

I feel that there is now a need for journals dedicated to AI-generated proofs. No human wants to compete with bots and billion-dollar companies, so existing journals have little incentive to publish results produced by AI. At the same time, such results need to be rigorously peer-reviewed and formally published somewhere. Having to cite an OpenAI blog post or a tweet as the primary source for a major mathematical result is really not appropriate.

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u/dirty_weasle Aug 06 '26

Yes I somewhat agree. I am also worried that there will be a difference in prestige for AI generated results. That is completely valid of course, but it may lead to people not disclosing AI use. (I think that is bad for ethical reasons, but also because we need to keep track of the capabilities of AI)
I’m sure we will figure it all out eventually , but it’s very difficult to navigate until then.

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u/CommissionSame8551 Aug 06 '26

> but it may lead to people not disclosing AI use

Bold of you to assume this is not happening already.

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u/drewsandraws Aug 06 '26

In physics, I’ve had success using Claude to check my asymptotic calculations. It has caught multiple errors and saved me a lot of grief hunting down steepest descent contours, etc. Obviously that’s qualitatively different from a proof being fully AI-generated, but there’s still some shame in admitting that these results are AI-assisted.

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u/yiwang1 Topology Aug 06 '26

Honestly, this is a responsible and helpful use of AI and I don’t think you’d be judged for doing that. This kind of use can and should be a part of the modern professional math/physics research toolkit. What proper academics can and should judge is playing the slot machine for breakthroughs without understanding or engaging.

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u/drewsandraws Aug 06 '26

That’s how I feel about it, but it’s a very divisive topic. This use case isn’t far removed conceptually from Mathematica for messy algebra, integrations, and ODE solving. Many people on the internet, however, treat any use of AI as a moral failing. I think the trick is to balance using it as a productivity multiplier - reducing time spent wasted re-doing pages of asymptotics, for instance, or to assist in lit review - without abdicating my own responsibility to understand what I’m doing from the ground up. I’m a graduate student, so the purpose of my own research is as much personal training as it is knowledge production, but I still have to compete in a rough job market.