Terence Tao's post, curated on eChai

Tao holds the Fields Medal and is one of the two or three people most often asked about Navier-Stokes. Twelve days before Buckmaster apologises for the state of his own Euler paper and calls it AI slop, Tao sets out why that was going to happen to somebody.

Terence Tao, in mathstodon.xyz

The advent of capable AI tools has highighted a variant of Simpson's paradox: a technological advance can improve the quality and volume of each individual's output, and yet the average quality (signal-to-noise ratio) of the aggregate output can deteriorate as a result. [...] whereas previously 90% of the extant literature was well-written, the situation is now completely reversed: 90% of the literature will now be poorly written.

Read it in full on mathstodon.xyz →