Very well written summary of the current situation

Imagine being someone who is working on one of these problems. You have no good guarantee that the problem was solved, but you will have the horrible homework of reading the AI slop. Also, if you do have something interesting to say about the problem, people will have less enthusiasm about it now

I read one of these papers (a relatively short one), solving a big problem in a field I used to work in, and it's exposition was above average.

I am no mathematician, but I can definitely relate to the "horrible homework of reading AI slop". We've started allowing a non-developer to submit AI generated code into our codebase (in droves).

When I am tasked with reviewing that code. First, I don't know if it's valid. The person who wrote it doesn't know if it's valid. In order to validate it I must step back and understand the full problem space. Then, when I ask for revisions or clarifications, it's seen as either

A - Slowing progress, being resistant to change... or... B - Thanks for catching that (Claude fix PR 532 with the review comments)

It's 100% removed the enthusiasm.

Perhaps, there is a point where we just "give up" the understanding and accept AI output as the ground truth, because the sheer amount of generation is too much for our puny human minds to comprehend, and a lot of the times it IS right, even if a little wonky.

The gradient into formalisms is steep and the bottom is deep. These are the worst results anyone will ever see again. The bottom of the internet is also deep, but won't be around much longer.