Donatella Iacono: Where I stand on AI
Update: End of September: I feel like I am following the white rabbit and choosing the red pill.
Update: On September 17, I joined (AHM): The association for Human Mathematics.
Beginning of August 2026: I totally agree with Vladimir Lazić. I thank him for his page. This urges me to share it on my page. It is not just copied and pasted it, but it is almost the same, since it perfectly reflects my statements and my own principles.
First of all, just to be clear, I am not against technology or AI at all, my concern is about the indiscriminate use of it.
I also encourage anyone concerned about AI to read Vlad's page, that is updated with useful links and statements such as the meaningful paper by Max Weinreich.
I signed the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics.
Mathematics is not mathematics unless done by humans. Literature is not literature unless written by humans. Art is not art unless created by humans. Therefore, I abide by the following principles.
- I do not use AI in my research. I urge my coauthors to do the same as much as possible when they collaborate with me.
- I do not referee papers written by a machine. I do not submit to a journal which allows machines to referee my work.
- I am not sure (and I doubt) that AI includes all citations for all the results used.
- I do not referee grant proposals written by machines. I do not allow my grant proposals to be refereed by machines.
- I do not supervise doctoral and postdoctoral researchers who use AI as a substitute for their own work. I do not support hiring of academic staff who use AI as a substitute for their own work.
- Teaching is not teaching unless done by humans.
- You are not an author of a paper to which your only contribution was to type a prompt in an LLM. If you put your name on such a paper, you are committing an ultimate violation of good scientific practice. You are not a mathematician unless you create new theories or prove new results: prompting a machine to do the work for you does not make you into a mathematician. Asking a machine to do the work for you does not warrant your authorship of a paper.
- I am not happy if my students use AI for their bachelor's thesis. So, the same is for colleagues, especially for those who use it without stating explicitly.
- I actively resist disgraceful attempts by several mathematicians, including Fields medallists, to destroy our discipline from the inside. I actively resist efforts by corporate interests to co-opt our discipline in order to legitimise their business interests.
- Passage taken from Principles by Vladimir Lazi?:"omissis...AI companies have not even remotely delivered on promises they started from: cures for illnesses, climate change, nuclear fusion; instead there are large investments in powerful hacking tools and military use. In absence of success on problems they had advertised, they seem to believe that solutions to abstract mathematical problems is a suitable compensation: they have to show that they are doing something which seems meaningful, and they found a fruitful ground among a group of mathematicians....omissis".
- Passage taken paper by Max Weinreich:"omissis...Why have AI companies come for mathematics first, when perhaps medicine or space travel would be more exciting to the public? There are many ways mathematics is special, and hence vulnerable: (1) Math is a highly valued human endeavor which requires almost no physical labor, so it is possible for machines without bodies to perform. (2) Math has a reputation for being incredibly difficult, so if AI models can do math, they seem omnipotent in the public eye. (3) Theorems have no immediate monetary value, so they can be shared. (4) AI companies were already hiring mathematicians, so they have an immediate route to cracking the code of prestige in our field.....omissis".
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