Amused by the disclaimer on Andy Pitman's latest preprint:
arxiv.org/abs/2610.10775
![Screenshot of the end of a maths paper from the arxiv. The text reads:
10. Tool use
Before they will allow me to post this paper, the moderators of the arXiv have told me to declare any use of “sophisticated tools” in its preparation. I suspect that they do not consider me a “sophisticated tool” for the purposes of this declaration. Despite this, I hope
the following remarks will satisfy them:
• I have understood the technical details of the proofs in this paper for well over a
decade. My 2012 paper [61] depended on Theorem A, and I would not have been
comfortable writing [61] without knowing how to prove Theorem A.
• Every word of this paper was written by me on my iMac using vim in a terminal
window.
• The figures were all drawn by hand using the software Inkscape. I did use an LLM
to convert the labels on the figures from the Inkscape default font to Computer
Modern so they would match the font used in the rest of the paper.
• The references are all papers/books that I already knew about or found using
mathscinet and google. I suppose I might have looked at the AI overview at the top
of a google search.
• I used an LLM to check the grammar and usage of this paper after it was written.
Because of this, it has slightly fewer “the the”s, and also takes more care with trivial
edge cases. For instance, the LLM was very insistent that since M0,3 is a single
point it is wrong to say that Mg,n is not compact and that we need to add points
corresponding to stable curves to compactify it.
• To find references in SGA, I used the LLM generated English translation of SGA that was posted at https://grothendiecksga.com. I would like to thank the anonymous creators of that website.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:43wdh3fcyzkxve2l342jzsyq/bafkreidtpmnv4s2wudjih3pvbhkavu3i22zmyvdxvkvnvccp7bnvoqrvs4)
Paul Johnson
@ptwiddle.bsky.social
364 followers 667 following 571 posts
American mathematician in the UK. Mellowing in middle age. He/Him.
American mathematician in the UK. Mellowing in middle age. He/Him.
