About our values

We base our recommendations on what we take to be characteristic values of mathematical research that we have a joint interest in preserving. Among these are the following:

1. There are many reasons to pursue mathematical research, ranging from intellectual curiosity to a desire to solve practical and societal problems. Underlying much of mathematics is the activity of proof. Mathematical proofs are regarded as conferring the highest degree of certainty to their conclusions, as well as imparting understanding of why their conclusions are true. These characteristics of proof support the scientific integrity of mathematics.
2. Results are attributable to specific authors who take credit for their discovery and assume responsibility for their correctness. These principles ground the merit-based standards to which we aspire in mathematical research.
3. Mathematical arguments are regarded as transparent and subject to independent verification. They may be extremely long or difficult, but in principle no proprietary knowledge or equipment should be required to understand them.
4. Mathematicians share a concern for proper evaluation of mathematical work relative to shared standards of depth, difficulty, and significance.
5. Mathematics produces not only a body of results, but also understanding, clarity, and judgment among the communities of mathematicians who have shaped them, often in the context of their own autonomously guided research. This expert knowledge is essential, both to effectively use mathematics, and to continue to articulate new and significant research questions. A key source of strength of the discipline has long been the autonomous shaping of the direction of research and the methods used to pursue it.

These characteristics of mathematics as a subject matter are also compatible with understanding mathematics as a human practice, and its place in the world. As mathematicians, and also as inhabitants of a shared world, we have a duty to care for other people and our environment.

Potential threats

Recent developments in artificial intelligence threaten each of these values, often in ways that disproportionately affect students and early-career mathematicians, and hence the long term future of the discipline.

1. Current automated techniques can produce plausible but unreliable (or even incorrect) arguments which are difficult to distinguish from correct mathematical proofs. This applies not only to informal arguments, but also to formalizations, where the difficulty lies in the translation between computer-encoded and human presentations of concepts. These fast-moving developments put our present system of review under increasing pressure, jeopardizing our ability to implement traditional standards for the correctness, transparency, and independent verifiability of proof.
2. Technologies that draw extensively on the published mathematical commons undermine the traditional system of attribution. Models trained on published works frequently return outputs that do not properly cite the human works they synthesize. Many current models are also built on data obtained by systematically exploiting licenses and access arrangements that were not made with artificial intelligence in mind, or indeed by simply violating copyright protections.
3. Technologies which affect the way in which mathematics is practiced may disturb the current system of incentives. The use of artificial intelligence — and thus also the sort of problems which it can address — may become incentivized for its own sake, disrupting our mechanisms for hiring, funding, and recognition. This disadvantages researchers who do not have access to the technologies or decision-making related to them, or who are unwilling to use technologies controlled by organizations whose values they do not share.
4. Proper evaluation is endangered if results are communicated through informal channels such as press releases or blog posts, often without any research paper or other disclosure of information necessary for scientific evaluation. This practice seeks publicity for new results on market timelines before the accepted processes of community evaluation in mathematics can take place. In many cases this leads to simplifications in reporting, such as overemphasizing the significance of automated tools and undervaluing the prior human contributions which have made those tools possible. Such oversimplification risks influencing public opinion in a way that not only damages perceptions of mathematics, but also misleadingly uses specific mathematical tasks as metrics for the general reasoning capacities of commercial products.
5. These developments put the autonomy of mathematics under threat. The increasing involvement of technology companies in mathematical research raises the risk that research questions may come to be prioritized because of their amenability to automated mathematics, rather than expert judgment of their deeper significance. Indeed, broader understanding of the field may be permanently lost in the process of automation. With university budgets under pressure, this reshaping also changes professional incentives in a manner which encourages the collaboration of researchers with technology companies on asymmetric terms. If left unchecked, these trends go beyond threatening researchers’ autonomy, affecting the scope and depth of mathematical research itself.

All of these challenges arise at a moment when the consequences of large-scale investment in artificial intelligence are being widely discussed in regard to warfare, mass surveillance, political disruption, and environmental damage. These raise grave ethical concerns. By failing to act, we run the risk of becoming complicit in the support of technologies which threaten much more than the practice of mathematics.

We thus feel that there is an urgent need for a considered response from the mathematical community. The following constitute brief descriptions of actionable recommendations. We encourage professional organizations to endorse this Declaration, and to add provisions according to their own values, priorities, and governance.