AI can speed up a lot of the manual labour needed to bring even an almost dead, 10-year-old device back to life. My Xiaomi Mi Max 2 (oxygen, MSM8953) was dead. With AI help and my own knowledge, I ported/rewrote the missing drivers, and it now runs Nura (postmarketOS) with working camera, torch, SIM, phone calls and SMS. Only the loudspeaker is still broken.
Everything is up for anyone who wants to install it, or to understand the changes and manually write the patches for mainline: https://github.com/sv1sjp/mi-max2-oxygen-msm8953-nura-drivers Testing, feedback and PRs welcome.
“Intellectual property” is mostly a capitalist idea. To give a direct example of the harm caused by LLMs using others’ work without attribution or credit, there is the recent case in which one of the models was being portrayed as finding a mathematical proof which was actually in it’s training data. The original authors will not get the credit, academic support, exposure and funding they would have gotten otherwise.
Also, even if information is not “owned”, it’s epistemology and source are an important part of it. Consumption by LLMs degrades the information by removing such metadata, and even worse hallucinating sources.
If the original authors have published their findings somewhere (journal / conference / arXiv), they will definitely get the credit from other mathematicians.
I don’t know about all AIs, but deepseek does cite sources. You can always cross-check them.
Unfortunately the proof found by the LLM combines work by different teams of mathematicians that cannot individually be published as proofs. It’s the equivalent of a scoop in investigation journalism by someone who was spying on journalists instead of doing any investigating. It’s on lemmy/wired: https://lemmy.world/post/52843754
It’s good that some do cite sources, however one major problem with generative AI is that it can produce volumes of output much faster than they can be verified. “You can always cross-check” is not viable at scale, and by the time LLM output gets cited, it becomes a quagmire potentially unlimited levels deep.
LLM output should never be treated as original until they can show their work transparently.
From what I understood from that article, OpenAI scooped the work of a couple of mathematicians (one an OpenAI employee, and both using OpenAI’s tools) and claimed it as their own. Stealing others’ work is not commonplace in science, but it does happen. The lesson here is to not trust OpenAI / Anthropic with your data or ideas, and to use local AI or at least less shady services. Also, the mathematicians will still get credit if they publish the findings first in a scientific journal, arXiv or conference - blogs and press releases sadly don’t count in academia.