alt Hacker NewsIt's a real example that's happened to me twice in the past year, so I'm not sure what to make of the idea that it's far away from how the real world works.
I'm also not sure I understand what you're objecting to if we agree that mathematicians define their field. The source link is a declaration from 25 Fields Medallists with precisely that goal. They believe/define/declare that the type of AI-generated proofs we've seen are vibecoded throwaway PoCs; they feel that a well-structured proof must include factors such as "a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others", and the success criterion is not a true/false conclusion but rather "development and integration into the mathematical canon".
Maybe your management has no idea what you work on. If so that's its own issue. Or maybe they do, and the person trying to take credit for more than they did just looks like an idiot. Like I said, I intentionally give throwaway PoC creation as a work item to people and it's fine. And if e.g. someone randomly made a drive-by PoC that proved that the approach I was exploring couldn't work and had some fundamental flaw, well, oddity of a random person doing it aside, I'd want to know that, and they'd deserve credit for saving us from a bad approach!
My objection is characterizing things like AI slop proofs as not valuable. Obviously it's valuable to know that:
1. NS has solutions that blow up in finite time.
2. This fact is provable, and we have a proof.
I don't think anyone anywhere is saying that these will replace mathematicians as they are now. I also think "a proper write-up, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others" is frankly not necessary or even desirable before we publish a computer generated result. We have a machine now that can spit out answers that we have good reason to believe are accurate, but they're perhaps inscrutable. There's no need to first decode the why and figure out proper attribution before simply posting the proof online. The proof itself does add value as it stands, even if it's not the ideal. Hoarding it until you can do a proper write-up would be silly.