But some working mathematicians have found chatbots to be extremely useful "collaborators." The most prominent of these is Terrence Tao, a Macarthur-winning mathematician who has excited many mathematicians and lay-people alike by publishing his chat-logs and the resulting mathematical work:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

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Again, as far as I know, no one has *actually* made a breakthrough this way, and the major impact on the field from giving chatbots to excitable outsiders has been to make the unsolicited manuscripts *much* longer, with the veneer of professionalism that means an expert might have to give them a second or even third glance to realize that they're nonsense.

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@TheOneDoc

We hear about all of this money being spent on swaying voters in elections but HOW is it being spent? Mostly on ads.

You could instead spend the money organizing and get much more bang for your buck. Hold public planning meetings, serve snacks, listen to people talk about what they care about and then act on those things.

The snacks and renting the pool hall cost much less than a TV ad. And you get more devoted followers ... but you need to listen.

Unfortunately, this is a situation that is perfectly suited to AI. If you've introspected your way into a mathematical "breakthrough" that no mathematician will discuss with you, you can avail yourself of any number of chatbots who will assure you that you've broken exciting new theoretical ground, and these chatbots will even act as "research collaborators," contributing more slop-physics or slop-math to your conclusions.

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Every mathematician and physicist I know receives a steady stream of breathless, over-the-transom "proofs" that solve some long-standing problem in the field, and none of these experts in my orbit has ever found a breakthrough in this material. It's a rare expert who will even respond to these unsolicited manuscripts. That's not their job. As Teresa Nielsen Hayden says, "You are not responsible for the things you do in other people's dreams."

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To make things worse, math - like physics - is a crank-magnet. These highly abstract, closed systems rely on introspection to advance the field, and some of those advances have been contributed by untrained laity, so it can be hard to know if your amazing idea about physics or mathematics represents an outsider's breakthrough or an amateurish cul-de-sac.

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Lately, AI companies have made headlines with a series of mathematical accomplishments that left mathematicians in an uproar and non-mathematicians in a muddle. Obviously, while mathematicians are qualified to assess these accomplishments, the rest of us are not. Beyond simple arithmetic, most of us don't do a lot of math on a regular basis, and even those of us who have to deploy a little geometry or stats typically don't engage with math at a *theoretical* level.

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This separation process is currently underway in many disciplines, thanks to the extraordinary capital available to AI companies. These companies are incinerating that capital in a series of extremely flash demos that are intended to ensure that the supply of bales of $100 bills that they feed to their money furnaces ("data centers") never stops.

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Writing without a writer and paintings without a painter are new phenomena, and learning to separate the formerly inseparable is the first step in our societal metabolization of these novelties. Recordings of musical performance have a place in our world, and so do performers.

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Just as important as the emergence of these hallucinations is their disappearance. For many of us, chatbots that *used to* pass the Turing Test now flunk it. The chatbots haven't gotten worse at impersonating humans, we've just gotten better at spotting the difference between a human and a bot, just as we got better at hearing the difference between a phonograph and a pianist.

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We supposed that their words and brushstrokes represented aesthetic and technical choices emanating from human creators who meant something by them (or at least were so satisfied by the accident of their appearance on the page that they left them stand). These creators were figments of our imagination. No one is home inside the AI. The intentionality we imputed to these works was the *actual* "AI hallucination":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/21/sunsetting/#oh-mr-sun-sun-mr-golden-sun-please-shine-down-on-me

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Just like the strag inferring the existence of "toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc, etc," we automatically imputed to these works both a creator and a creative impulse.

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Even knowing that these works were extruded by an algorithm, it was hard to shake the conviction that they were the product of human creativity. These works were "eerie," in the sense that Mark Fisher uses, "the seeming of intent without an intender":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

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