Tao's critique of AI in the field of mathematics reminds me of what French art critic Charles Baudelaire said in the 19th century about photography [0].

Baudelaire argued that photography became a haven for failed painters, the sorts of hacks that could not finish proper training. Photography, as a mechanical rendering of the world, could only record what already existed; it couldn't transform reality the way a painting could.

He also criticized the public's craze for "rushing" into it, and complained that this technical "progress" was weakening the arts.

Do you see some parallels as well?

[0] https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Curiosit%C3%A9s_esth%C3%A9tiq...

I have listened quite a few interviews with Tao and I see him being very careful about criticizing AI. He very often emphasizes the usefulness of it. Where he is critical has a lot of merit. One of the points I clearly remember him saying that having AI be able to solve many of the open problems, regardless of how important there are (there are many open problems that are not that important) greatly reduces the problem space for mathematics students to give new problems to work on.

In a parallel thread omnicognate correctly pointed out that for AI companies it's a direct commercial loss to pour all this money into bruteforcing the solutions to these problems, and that a lot of times the solutions by themselves are not directly commercially valuable. They are doing it for stock price, trying to lure in private capital in preparation for IPOs.

Their models are good, but they are not the moat because Chinese models are good too, so what they are doing, in my opinion, is more harm than good. Mathematics is a science by humans for humans.

I think there's a difference between "photography will change art--we need to be ready" and "photography will change art, therefore stop photography."

There is no doubt that AI has changed the practice of mathematics, just as it has changed the practice of software engineering (and will soon change almost every intellectual job).

Trying to deal with change by saying, "please stop the change" is foolish, IMHO. Mathematicians need to redesign the discipline with AI in mind. But I get that it's easy for me to say that and hard to actually do.

Both of Baudelaire’s criticisms were reasonable, and the same thing happened again when AI image generation showed up. You think the opponents look ridiculous because you’re viewing the history from the winner’s side. As for “the public,” people had a real demand for photography as a way to record things, which is also why it won. There is no comparable public demand for proving Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Genuine Art versus Mechanism, from 1901, (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25505621) is another article that I read a few years ago that other people might find interesting.

I don't think the analogy works because for the past few years Tao has been one of the most vocal advocates of AI in mathematics and has used it extensively in his own research. You can find several of his talks about this on YouTube. It's completely consistent to believe two things at once, that the tools are useful and that the companies are misbehaving.

Are you aware that Tao is among the largest proponents of using AI in mathematics? The usage itself is not the point here.

People aren't ready to discuss AI assisted imagery as art yet. Most discussions lack the nuance that Baudelaire lacks in that critique, which deals with the nature of art and the importance of human intention and input.

We can start having a meaningful discussion when people use real reasoning instead of analogy.

Keep in mind that his critique is very recent, and likely applying to a specific use of AI, as opposed to AI as a whole. If you've been following his Mastodon account, he's been happily using LLMs for math purposes for well over a year.

I'm really tired of these arguments (this and "it's just like calculators").

Photography decimated other forms of visual art, so the concern wasn't wrong. But AI threatens the entirety of human intellectual endeavors. I can make do without oil paintings in my home. I'm not sure I want to live in a future where we make do without brains.

Wasn’t the criticism of photography kind of correct though? I don’t think people think of photography as an art as much as painting is an art. There aren’t a lot of photographs that a layman couldn’t in principle also take, but only a few people could replicate a good painting.

Baader–Meinhof phenomenon:

Baudelaire popped up in this article two days ago.

https://www.noemamag.com/a-new-kind-of-creative-poverty/

It’s not a parallel. No one ever claimed photography to be the same as painting or some other medium - it was a new medium that wasn’t respected.

AI is being treated and pushed as a replacement for every medium.

Wonder what would've Baudelaire said about generative art as in diffusion-based imagery.

Photography vs painting is the first thing that comes to my mind when I listen to AI critics.

We can’t look back with perfect hindsight because both the past and present have deeply ingrained blindspots. They don’t know what it is like to live in a world with perfect edges. We don’t know what it is like to live in a world with no edges. We can read about someone who proclaims that “something will be lost”. We will just think “but I have no need for any of that.” But we don’t even know what it is.

No, there are no parallels. It is just cliche propaganda used by AI boosters.