Post by @scruiser@awful.systems

2026-10-09 14:54 UTC

Or cite it, but in the most passive aggressive way you can get away with. …You should check the literature really carefully to make sure that whatever proof the AI “generated” doesn’t actually already exist somewhere and it regurgitated it without proper accreditation.

Replies (1)

@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-10-09 16:30

The spammer in question had previously posted a bigger result, but the writeup was so unreadable that some people in the field wrote a new, readable paper with the same result. In their abstract, they specifically cited him and said that the proof was so unreadable that they were unable to follow the details. (The proof in question also used math that was advanced enough to be far beyond the spammer’s knowledge.) My pet theory is that after this embarrassment, the spammer saw that nobody was able to verify his argument. Now the real problem is that his paper was written so badly that nobody could understand it (in math, you can’t verify what you can’t understand), but somehow he thought that the problem was that he didn’t add an experiments section!

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