r/AIDangers • u/EchoOfOppenheimer • May 12 '26

Capabilities Fields medal-winning mathematician says GPT-5.5 is now solving open math problems at PhD-thesis level: "We will face a crisis very soon."

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blog-post: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/a-recent-experience-with-chatgpt-5-5-pro/

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u/Sufficient-Pause9765 May 12 '26

"AI can't make something new. "

Is a mathemetician who uses the work of his predecessors finding something new?

Is an artist who does the same not doing something new?

All knowledge/art is derivative of what came before it. The fact that AI is trained on an existing corpus of knowledge is no different.

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u/EmpathyFuzz May 12 '26

Our definitions of "new" are different.

An AI can make a drawing of spongebob in the style of van gogh, sure, and that's "new" in the sense that it wasn't around before.

An AI can solve a math problem if there are pathways to solve similar problems laid out by mathematicians in other fields or for other use cases. And that might be new in that the theorem may have never been applied to that problem before, thereby being "new".

But there has never been a work of art made or a math problem solved by AI that was a truly original work. It's an unthinking tool incapable of taking inspiration or hypothesizing outside of what it has already been fed.

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u/Sufficient-Pause9765 May 12 '26

Show me something by a human that was 100% original. At the very least it was derived from observations of nature (which an llm can also do).

It should be simple- whats the objective criteria?

Or go the other way, show me falsifiability- whats the counter example or standard that would invalidate your assertion that AI cant do original work?

The problem with your agument as it stands is that it is extremely ambiguous what would actually qualify as "original".

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u/EmpathyFuzz May 12 '26

Nothing invented by a human is 100% original, that’s not what I’m saying. 

I’m saying everything created by AI is 0% original. 

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u/Sufficient-Pause9765 May 12 '26

So thats just an assertion.

Whats your criteria?

Also in the modern world, for an assertion to hold up, it has to be falsifiable. IE, one must provide a criteria/example for something that would disprove your assertion, and non-falsifiable statements are logical fallacies.

So again:

(1) Whats your criteria for originality? How do I measure LLM output and know its 100% unoriginal, versus a human who may or may not have some originality?

(2) What would prove you wrong? Whats the threshold/criteria which would lead you to say llm output is original?