TL;DR
AI has turned mathematics and creative work into a survival game in a dark forest: publishing your work in the open invites instant copying, so people now hide their ideas like the 'wallfacers' of Liu Cixin's novel.
In the second volume of Liu Cixin's 'Three-Body Problem,' the universe is a dark forest: every civilization is a hunter with a gun, and whoever reveals their position is eliminated. Now, thanks to AI, scientists and writers on Earth live in that same forest.
Jungle rules in the mathematical dark forest
Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and a colleague at Anthropic recently came close to solving the Navier-Stokes equation, one of the millennium problems. But they were forced to publish early because OpenAI, it seems, had peeked at their work and rushed out 'its own' solution.
The victims couldn't even protest: they had been using OpenAI's models for a year, and their chat logs may well have gone into training data. Working in the open, you get scooped by a faster hunter.
When proofs lose their soul
Terence Tao calls AI-generated proofs 'odorless'—correct but offering none of the human insight that makes a proof resonate. Like asking an AI to write a fantasy trilogy: the plot works but the soul is missing. Open math problems have become a 'non-renewable resource,' mined out by AI and then discarded.
People used to discuss works in progress openly; now everything must be kept secret. Creative work has become slash-and-burn: AI burns inspiration to ashes, grows a crop or two, then moves on.
The only way out, authors argue, is to become a 'wallfacer' like in Liu's novel: hide your ideas behind a wall, tell no one. But if everyone hides, culture stops growing. The forest will be filled with statues, and no one will know their makers.
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