Math community mocked for shifting goalposts: "If AI can solve it, it wasn't math"

RexDouglass · x · 2026-09-08

The author mocks the math community's goalpost-shifting on AI: after decades wanting solutions to hard problems, mathematicians now claim AI-solvable problems "aren't real math" and that they don't even want to know if it's possible. He likens it to a god-of-the-gaps argument—math is whatever humans are doing; when AI solves something, that thing retroactively "wasn't math."

Related event: AI proof of ζ(5)(3) irrationality sparks debate over what counts as research(20 posts)→

Original post →

More from AGI Musings

AGI Musings channel →