The professor's value was/is in being one of a few people with the capability of interpreting the shorthand. By translating it with AI, his value as an interpreter begins evaporating as the translated workbooks become accessible to more logicians.

He might see his value in his role of carrying the knowledge itself rather than being its gatekeeper.

I actually got a very different impression. He could publish this interesting result, exactly because he had been working on this project i.e., had an interesting dataset to feed into Claude and had the expertise to interpret its output.

Compare him to those who are burning tokens to generate cringeworthy AI slop on social media. The value of a tool depends on the skill of the user.

First, he gained that skill just for this task specifically.

It's not some unique, hard-to-acquire skill. It's rare because nobody needs it anymore.

The value of that professor is, and was, his mathematical ability.

Second, he fed transcription into Claude. The work that Claude did wasn't deciphering the shorthand.

The works aren't accessible not because of the shorthand. It's because the mathematics of Godel's work is hard.

The ability of the LLM to hold a large context, connect the pieces, and synthesize output is not a human ability, as the professor himself said.

And he didn't want to milk that for the rest of his life because he's a smart guy that has other skills and interests