More than 1000 mathematicians have pledged not to work for AI companies and to avoid using their models – to varying extents – in their research. The move comes amid a growing backlash against the way AI companies have used their models to solve thorny mathematical problems, many of which had stumped humans for decades.
The Association of Human Mathematicians (AHM) was created in the wake of controversial discoveries from AI companies, such as the release of 722 papers in one fell swoop by OpenAI earlier this month. Membership now stretches to more than 1000 people, including professors and PhD students.
Terence Tao at the University of California, Los Angeles, said last month that the way in which these discoveries are being made and “dumped” on the mathematical community may harm the field. While in many cases the results are formalised, so can be relied upon as accurate solutions, they are often presented in an impenetrable and hastily written way that leaves the field struggling to extract meaning and understanding.
In response, an independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence was set up that would advise AI companies on best practice. OpenAI has previously said that it would take this advice on board, but its most recent release seems to go against many of the group’s suggestions.
The AHM asks three pledges of members, but the third is optional. Therefore, there are two groups: the “vegetarians” who have opted not to work with or for AI companies, and also not to use chatbots to write papers, lecture notes or books, and secondly the “vegans” who have gone one step further and eschewed AI in research entirely.
Sam Raskin at Yale University is a vegetarian member who chose not to sign the third pledge because there was slight ambiguity about whether his practice of occasional use for simple tasks counted.
Raskin says that AHM membership is diverse and that the pledges are “pretty mild”, but motivations for joining vary from environmental concern to personal fears over job security. For him, it is because he believes mathematics to be a fundamentally human activity which brings him joy when done the old-fashioned way – but also about sending a signal to others that he isn’t working for an AI company.
“I keep hearing about people who are in positions of leadership in the mathematical community, [who] lead institutions and things, and are quietly being paid by either Anthropic or OpenAI and are not disclosing this information necessarily. And I think that’s toxic,” says Raskin.
Steven Sivek at Imperial College London (who is a vegan member) says that the AHM is not simply a list of people who are against AI, but has set up groups to hash out what the field should look like in a post-AI world. These include committees on how to protect pre-prints from being consumed by new AI models in training data, solve potential career problems for professors and investigate how undergraduate and graduate teaching will need to change.
“We’re not denialists. We’re not sticking our heads in the sand and saying ‘this is not happening’,” says Sivek. “I mean, it is happening, it’s real. We need to figure out how to adapt the profession to this new emerging reality.”
For Sivek, joining the AHM was also a statement about how he sees mathematics as a craft that involves hard work, deep thought and satisfying results. “It’s not something I personally want to to do, to switch off some part of my brain and just let the machine handle it. I’m not comfortable putting out things that I don’t understand, that I can’t vouch for,” he says.
For Hervé Le Dret at Sorbonne University, France, membership is about a smorgasbord of ethical concerns, including AI’s “scandalous waste of resources and environmental impact”.
OpenAI and Anthropic did not respond to ‘s request for comment.