I imagine the same will be true of AI, but I'll say that in the short term AI is going to make mathematicians better because it solves the breadth problem. Again, I feel like this Barnette conjecture got solved (if it is solved) because of some clever partition function sums which are intellectually tractable but simply too far out of anything I'd seen before (I see the apparition of my GT combinatorics professor intoning gravely that "everyone knows that, Jake, you're an idiot"). Maybe AI will help identify common threads far greater than Google and journal search.
I think if I had ChatGPT when I was 20 and working on this problem for the first time I might not have solved it, but I would have learned every angle and facet of it far more quickly. But then again I would not have spent so many late nights staring at the Országház across the Danube and letting my mind drift and bump against the problem like spilled cargo in the river.
Now if we can prove this, expand it to the whole spectrum of academic studies, and somehow convince 99.99% of us that they are basically garbage and we don’t care about them — sure the elites will throw UBI around but that’s it — then maybe AI is very positive to the human specie.
Oh we better pick up the speed of cloning and artificial fertilization quickly, because people who are told to be garbage probably have no interests in boring children, and it is still a myth how genies are born and grown. We need that diversity.
BTW the whole scheme reads like the background of a Chinese net novel 赛博英雄传.