I replied to a comment about AI in sports and I build on that.

We praise car drivers despite most of the performance in their sport comes from the car. The driver makes the difference when two cars are close in performance. Brilliances or mistakes. Horse riders too.

In the case of math, the human can lead the LLM on the right track, point it to a problem or to another one. So it deserves some praise.

Then the team that built the car, cared about the horse, built the AI might deserve even more praise but we tend to care more about the single most visible human.

>Would we regard that as a major achievement of the mathematician? I don’t think we would

For some reason this reminds me of AI images and a domain like comedy.

If an image makes people laugh, the person who prompted it to make the image certainly doesn't get credit for the vast majority of the work in its creation, but perhaps they do get credit for the initial prompt idea and then the "taste" to select that particular one from whatever drafts they went through or otherwise guiding it.

So if a mathematician comes up with an amazing result that an LLM "did", I think they could still get a bit of credit for prompting it to do it and being its guide.

But whereas the first person could perhaps be called a comedian and not an artist, would the mathematician still be called a mathematician or something else?

I would. Even if someone found a prompt or even automated the conversation and just searched all open math problems I still would. If they produced a useful result without harm to anyone, that's a valuable human activity that should be rewarded just as well as we reward the other mathematicians, which I imagine is quite a lot, given all the billionaire mathematicians...

It may not be a major achievement by the mathematician (although it's debatable) but it would still be a major result.