This is not specific to math. To non-academics, you basically have to rewrite your commit history to make it seem more impressive. You often write the motivation section last. At least math publication culture allows saying "We consider the problem of" and then solve it. In AI/ML academic papers you need much more "story" around why, what the applications are, why aren't you doing something else, defend against lack-of-novelty attacks, defend against "this is just A + B known techniques used together" etc.
replyYeah, publishing in ML can be annoying because of that. What's wrong with "I thought this problem was interesting"?
replyBecause your institution's PR department and the journal you're publishing in want the publicity of "scientist cures cancer". And you probably wrote "I'm curing cancer" in your grant application, team charter, or whatnot.
replyI think its a total travesty of our society that people are desired to identify both the problem and the solution
replypeople without solutions are told not to point out the problem
and people with the skillset to bring solutions dont have the skillset to search for problems or apply their seemingly unrelated disciplines to it
so you get a lot of capital and energy thrown at people who purport to be both
If AI can address this too, that would be profoundly impactful. The cross disciplinary work that a single college course is supposed to reveal, finally realized