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The Leiden Declaration: Mathematicians Resist the AI Tide

At 48:03 · chapter starts 42:40

The conversation turns to the Leiden Declaration, the open letter that prompted this interview. Kevin Roose characterizes it as 'a very worried document,' and Hartnett agrees: it reflects the anxiety of a discipline that successfully self-regulated for centuries now facing a massive exogenous disruption it had no part in creating ^{[1] — Kevin Hartnett "Over 800 mathematicians signed the Leiden Declaration warning that AI is producing plausible but unreliable proofs, eroding human expertise…" 42:37 Play} . The declaration has two main aims: first, setting rules for disclosure — if you use AI in a proof, you must say so, and the Math Archive is already enforcing this with year-long bans for undisclosed AI use; second, protecting the field's priorities from being overrun by whatever kinds of problems AI happens to be good at. Casey Newton raises the obvious counterargument: isn't this what every profession says when a new technology arrives? Hartnett concedes the point but argues that math is different — it's genuinely possible for AI to strip the incentive and value out of the discipline without fully replacing it, the way streaming can devalue the album without replacing the experience of listening to one. The deeper worry, Hartnett argues, is that mathematics is 'a quintessentially human endeavor, the pinnacle of human thought,' and that losing the human wrestle behind a proof changes the nature of the activity even if the outputs look the same.