https://dailynous.com/2026/08/13/philosophy-journal-publishes-largely-ai-authored-article-on-purpose-guest-post/

[u/simism66]

[u/simism66]

Mathematicians are currently facing a wave of AI-generated results and wondering what will become of the discipline. It has so far remained unclear whether the same sort of thing will happen in philosophy, and, if so, when. Yesterday, Simon Goldstein had a guest post in the Daily Nous announcing that he had Claude write a paper largely on its own, and the paper had been published in Philosophy and Public Affairs, one of the top journals in political philosophy and applied ethics. Reading this post and (at least some of) the paper has now led me to increase my confidence that philosophers will be facing the sort of situation that mathematicians are facing sooner rather than later.

I'm not an expert in the area of philosophy that the paper is in, and so I'm not really qualified to properly review it, but this is clearly very different from a Sokal scandal. The paper is not "AI slop." It's a reasonable philosophy paper whose publication would not attract controversy if it were not for the fact that it was produced by AI. From the comments and Simon's own remarks, it seems clear that it is not absolutely top-tier philosophy, and Simon is clearly particularly skilled at getting Claude to produce (relatively) good philosophy. So, it's still certainly not the case that current models can autonomously produce top-tier philosophy. However, the models are progressing fast (and the next generation of OpenAI models are at least rumored to be much better at writing than the current generation). It now seems to me very likely that, within a few years, AI systems will be able to autonomously generate philosophy papers that blind referees will deem acceptable for publication in the very top philosophy journals.

I am not sure how the field should react to this, and I don't really have any positive suggestions at the moment, but I'm interested to hear people's thoughts.

[u/Protean_Protein → u/simism66]

It was already the case that too many papers of too questionable quality were being published (even while equally questionable gatekeeping of various sorts continues at certain journals).

One wonders whether this might produce the sort of reckoning we thought might happen for undergraduates, in which the expectations are simply raised. “Good paper” seems like an incredibly low bar, and it strikes me as odd that we accept that in our discipline. It seems to raise a sort of nihilistic spectre: What exactly is the point of publication?

[u/simism66 → u/Protean_Protein]

I agree. A lot of what gets published even in top journals is essentially published because it is a "good paper," which makes a definite but relatively minor contribution to a specific subfield with its scope properly defined so that referees (typically within that subfield) really have no grounds to complain. It seems likely to me that AI will be able to write such a paper relatively soon.

Back when I was a grad student, our library had physical copies all of the main journals, going way back. When I looked through issues of Mind from the 50s, it seems like people were doing much more interesting and original philosophy, even if it was an author I had never heard of. Call me old-fashioned, but maybe one can hope that, in light of this, real philosophy like that becomes the aspiration for actually good philosophy again.

[u/CallMeTheCon → u/simism66]

I wonder if this is a result of what happens when most academic philosophers look only to the past to validate their principles of ethics, morals, etc., under a certain specialized ism of philosophy or under a certain philosophical tradition, which that philosophy's history can perpetuate. History within most traditions is constantly criticized for being biased when in reality, they were anything but, being critical is usually the precedent among Western philosophers. Being critical as an ethical principle under the branches of philosophy the world over is didactic when considering the use of AI considering the fact that most definitions of words imply a difference where in local realities, there is no real or empirically identifiable difference to the reader. Most of academic philosophy is simply literature with a philosophical implication, not actual philosophy. Real philosophers make an attempt at being ethical in some format and question their methodology, reasoning, context, etc etc etc. I don’t think that simply writing about it and then going back to teach whatever money-governed pedagogy already exists is philosophical at all, it’s simply the action of self-sustaining.

[u/DavidSchlichting]

Maybe this is Hopium, but this could have a positive effect. The purpose of Philosophy should not be to force out papers for the sake of publishing papers. It should be to… philosophise. If a philosopher has an interesting, preferably new, philosophical thought they should write a paper about it. If not, then they should not. Maybe this eases the “publish or perish” pressure a bit. Lots of published philosophy papers are quite frankly not needed. Also if an AI has a genuinely good unique “thought” (let’s call it “idea” maybe…) then… I guess good for us? The bigger threat I see to our field is that students just use AI to do everything, but in the end they’re the ones robbing themselves of a great education.

[u/boxedfood]

Yawn

[u/dem4life71]

I know this will generate a lot of hate, but what if there is actually some progress made by AI, either mathematically or philosophically or medically or otherwise? A big breakthrough could change the public’s perception of AI dramatically.

I say this as a person with no bias towards AI. I’m just as skeptical of it was the next person.

[u/simism66 → u/dem4life71]

There already have been major breakthroughs by AI in mathematics. It's not clear, however, what would constitute a "breakthrough" in philosophy. Even if you want to say that something like "the hard problem of consciousness" occupies a similar position in philosophy to something like the Riemann hypothesis in math, there is no clear criteria for determining whether or not something counts as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, so it's not obvious what it would mean for AI to "solve" it. I suppose it's possible that AI produces a paper that is so clear and persuasive that everyone regards it as definitively solving the problem, but I highly doubt something like that could happen in philosophy.

[u/greginnj → u/simism66]

"Major breakthroughs" is quite a stretch to describe the new math generated by AI so far. Your comment seems to imply that the new results are somewhere near the level of the Riemann hypothesis, when most would say they're orders of magnitude less significant - a few conjectures and Erdos problems have been resolved, and some would likely qualify as new work worthy of a PhD thesis, but I haven't seen any mathematicians calling these proofs anything like major breakthroughs.

The level of excitement in discussions is more a measure of the surprise that AI engines not particularly tuned to do advanced mathematics were able to get these results at all. That shouldn't be confused with a measure of the mathematical significance of the results themselves.

On the philosophy side, as a hypothetical, let's say that an AI engine came up with Gettier's "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" (in a world where that paper and its insight didn't previously exist). That would constitute a major breakthrough, I'd say - as well as kicking off lots of discussion about whether the AI could be said to have a theory of mind at the level necessary to come up with it.

[u/simism66 → u/greginnj]

I didn't intend to imply that the breakthroughs in math have been at the scale of the Riemann hypothesis (though I can now see that what I wrote seems to suggest that). But I don't think the term "breakthrough" is inapt. The disproof of the Jacobian Conjecture (for dimensions greater than 2) was a pretty big deal, and the proof of the existence of non-sofic groups was an even bigger deal. At least the latter is regarded as a very major result in group theory, significantly beyond anything that would be expected of a PhD thesis.

As I read the situation, the level of excitement (or fear, or sense of crisis) in discussions is not just surprise that the systems are doing these things, but, given the way things are progressing, the expectation that they will produce Riemann-level results in the relatively near future, and perhaps even develop whole new fields of mathematics that human beings aren't cognitively equipped to understand.

I've been following the situation in math very closely since the release of o1, two years ago, and I have a blog post about it here, if you're interested: https://www.ryansimonelli.com/absolute-irony-blog/the-crisis-in-mathematics-and-the-prospect-of-aicademia

Regarding the Gettier example, sure, perhaps that's a better example of the sort of thing that could be called a "breakthrough" in philosophy, and be unambiguously regarded as a "result." Other things that come to mind are more technical things like Lewis's triviality result about conditional probabilities, which van Frassen described as "a veritable bombshell." I could see AI producing something like this, and perhaps something that's an even bigger bombshell.

[u/greginnj → u/simism66]

Ah thanks! I wasn't aware of the non-sofic group result yet (in my defense, it's less than 2 weeks old!), but I'd agree that this result is fairly consequential and beyond thesis level. I'll check out your blog post!

[u/amour_propre_ → u/simism66]

As I read the situation, the level of excitement (or fear, or sense of crisis) in discussions is not just surprise that the systems are doing these things, but, given the way things are progressing, the expectation that they will produce Riemann-level results in the relatively near future, and perhaps even develop whole new fields of mathematics that human beings aren't cognitively equipped to understand.

I'm sorry, then how on earth are we supposed to judge the correctness of the results in the newly developed field? How can you tell that it ("the AI") has not merely produced gibberish? Maybe AI has already crossed the barrier, and the people at OpenAI have dismissed the results as gibberish!

You have mentioned that the 20 or 12 results listed by OpenAI were solved by their in-house model. The key issue here is we do not know what the in-house models are like or how many attempts (A) it made at the problems (P). How many of A were 1) failures (f) in the sense that the model concluded that it could not prove the result or crashed, 2) false negatives (FN), the model proved the opposite of what the theorem claimed is true, 3) false positive (FP), the model provide a false proof that it claimed is true but was found to be wrong based on human mathematician checking. Hell, we do not even know what the set of attempted problems (p) was? Surely the in-house model was not set on just those 12 or 20 problems. Without these values A, p, P, FP, FN, f, we cannot scientifically ascertain "the mathematical capabilities of AI."

Imagine a mathematician (or 100s) with infinite life and time attempting a large number of problems and providing an enormous number of false proofs, false disproofs, and plainly wasting paper and journal space (analogous to AI's data and energy consumption). Of these enormous numbers of attempts, a few attempts, when checked by a human mathematician, seem like genuine reasoned arguments, which they rewrite as actual proofs. If this scenario is what is actually going on, then no one would call either the mathematicians or the AI intelligent. There is an opportunity cost of intelligence. The deep problem with current AI is that it makes mistakes which no human being would ever make or correct himself immediately.

As for AI's paper in PPA, that is easily explained: the AI got accepted at Princeton/Harvard/Oxbrdige, because I have heard PPA only publishes people from there (lol).

[u/thedialectitian → u/simism66]

It's not clear, however, what would constitute a "breakthrough" in philosophy.

A paper that gets cited a ton, and is regarded as indispensable reading for anyone in the field? That certainly hasn't happened yet.

[u/Protean_Protein → u/dem4life71]

Terry Tao has said some stuff publicly about AI progress in math.

[u/UnderTheCurrents]

A lot of continental philosophy papers could be simulated in the 90s by fairly primitive technology as well. The PoMo-generator comes to mind.