What Fine-Art Photography Can Teach Us About AI in Mathematics
The argument usually goes that painters initially saw photography as a threat, yet photography did not make painting obsolete! Kodak sold cameras and film, but it was not simultaneously using those cameras to compete with photographers for artistic recognition. With AI, the same companies building the systems are also using them to work on research problems, announce mathematical results and demonstrate their capabilities on questions that mathematicians themselves are studying.
- ▪The argument usually goes that painters initially saw photography as a threat, yet photography did not make painting obsolete!
- ▪Kodak sold cameras and film, but it was not simultaneously using those cameras to compete with photographers for artistic recognition.
- ▪With AI, the same companies building the systems are also using them to work on research problems, announce mathematical results and demonstrate their capabilities on questions that mathematicians themselves are studying.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 4,868 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (AI / LLM) |
| Canonical URL | https://quantumformalism.substack.com/p/what-fine-art-photography-can-teach |
| Publication time | Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:35:05 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-14T18:56:51.352Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-14T18:56:51.352Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | -VDlLBi_byS- · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
All-in-MathsWhat Fine-Art Photography Can Teach Us About AI in MathematicsQuantum Formalism (QF)Sep 14, 20262ShareSo much has been happening in AI for mathematics recently, including OpenAI’s claimed progress on the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, that we thought it was worth reflecting on where this could lead.One comparison that keeps appearing is photography and painting. The argument usually goes that painters initially saw photography as a threat, yet photography did not make painting obsolete! In fact, photography became an artistic form in its own right while painting continued to develop alongside it, leaving us with two forms of artistic expression that use very different tools.Mathematics may follow a similar path, although the relationship between AI companies and…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (AI / LLM).
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Hacker News (AI / LLM)
