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How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?

158 points · 146 comments · jjgreen

  1. rramadass · · focus · HN ↗
    > Regardless of the true cost, it seems that professional mathematicians now need to wary about what they put into a LLM and think hard about how to disclose and publish a result.

    This is all but guaranteed now.

    Mathematicians/Scientists/Researchers need to stop sharing freely with "AI Companies" and have explicit clauses in place in their publications about not using their research without their explicit consent.

    There should be a clear legal distinction between using research data for AI model-training vs. another researcher using it.

    Come up with a legal framework, establish procedures for sharing and using others work and have a single scientific body in charge of enforcing it.

    1. nradov · · focus · HN ↗
      Just putting a clause in a publication won't prevent it from being used as training data. Information wants to be free.

      The frontier LLM vendors do sell enterprise licenses which contractually guarantee that your prompts won't be used for training. (Maybe they'll secretly violate the agreement but in principle it's legally enforceable.) Scholars and universities who care about credit and attribution will either have to purchase those licenses or run their own private open-weight LLM instances.

      1. Analemma_ · · focus · HN ↗
        I don't like this and I wish it weren't true, but I think the period of "information wants to be free" is coming to an end, it was a relic of a bygone era. Increasingly, making your information free means you're the sucker who is doing free labor for AI companies, or worse, you're helping your competitors. Paywalls, login walls, and rate-limits are going up everywhere: there's the GitLab news on the home page right now, and sites like Twitter, Reddit etc. which used to be publicly-readable are now gated (and Xitter is using the legal system to shut down any bypasses).

        I hate this but I don't think there's any going back now that LLMs exist.

        1. mitxela · · focus · HN ↗
          It was originally a contrast: "information wants to be free, because .... and information wants to be expensive, because ...."

          <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Information_wants_to_be_free#History" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Information_wants_to_be_free#H...

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