OpenAI posts 700 maths preprints online: mathematicians are up in arms

The research community is in uproar after OpenAI released a trove of more than 700 mathematical preprints entirely generated by AI on 6 October. The San Francisco, California-based maker of ChatGPT posted the preprints on the software repository Github.

Although some mathematicians celebrated the solution of longstanding problems, others took to social media to complain about being scooped. Some were incensed at what one physicist called a ‘slopocalypse’, even if the mathematical content could end up being formally correct.

www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03196-8

Can someone please explain to a non-mathematician what the issue is specifically?

We all want the problems solved, right? Is there a wrong way to solve them? Or a process that people are supposed to follow not to “scoop” others? A honor system of sorts?

If a human dropped the same 700 solutions online, would it still be bad?

There are two issues really - one is a perception that they’re not vetting any of this output, just dumping it out on the internet and expecting real mathematicians to actually check it all, so yes if a human was doing the same thing it’d probably still be suspect.

The other is the widely held suspicion that much of the “breakthrough” mathematics here has been stolen from real researchers who’ve been using chatgpt to develop their theories by talking to it