Erik Hoel: AI turns intellectual culture into a dark forest of wallfacers

erikphoel · x · 2026-09-10

In his new essay "Culture Becomes a Dark Forest" (with behind-the-scenes notes), Erik Hoel argues AI is forcing intellectuals to work like wallfacers from Three-Body Problem: crouching quietly to finish original contributions before a prompt can produce an almost-as-good version that mines away the insight and reward.
He draws an analogy to how social media made everyone paranoid about being filmed; AI now makes thinkers hide their ideas. "This sucks."
On the OpenAI Navier-Stokes controversy, he says media coverage is badly wrong — the first NYT piece credulously reported OpenAI's side — and there are clear indications solutions came from user data in training (e.g., his Jacobian example), noting OpenAI's weasel wording.
Search isn't intelligence, but the scale is enormous (10,000 subjective years); a non-genius math PhD given 10,000 years could plausibly solve it. He wants a study of whether AI-solved problems match mathematicians' unfinished drafts sitting in OpenAI chats.

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