Researchers Make AI Their Confidant, But Can’t Afford To Let Their Guard Down

by · Inc42

SUMMARY

  • Researchers are increasingly using AI tools to accelerate research, but unpublished work fed into these systems can create new risks around confidentiality and ownership.
  • The Buckmaster-OpenAI episode highlights the uncertainty over what happens to sensitive research once it enters an AI system.
  • Indian institutions are drafting AI-use policies, but legal protections for unpublished research remain limited, leaving researchers to rely largely on preventive safeguards.
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Imagine spending a decade trying to solve one of mathematics’ hardest problems. You finally make progress only to see an AI model produce a possible solution in a matter of days.

This is what happened to Tristan Buckmaster, a 41-year-old Australian mathematician at New York University who has spent years studying the mathematics of how fluids move and behave.

At the core of the issue are the Navier–Stokes equations, a set of mathematical equations developed in the 19th century to describe how fluids move. Engineers and scientists use them to model everything from airflow around aircraft to weather systems.

But mathematicians still aren’t sure whether these equations always hold, or could break down and produce an infinite or otherwise impossible result. Solving this is one of seven Millennium Prize Problems.

According to OpenAI, it asked an unreleased AI model to work on the problem on September 1. Four days later, the model produced a possible proof.

This is exactly where the controversy starts.   

Buckmaster and his collaborator Levent Alpöge had put drafts of their unpublished research into OpenAI’s coding tool, Codex. Buckmaster was concerned that OpenAI’s AI may have drawn on his unpublished work, but he had no way to prove that it had.  

While OpenAI denied that the mathematician’s work influenced the system, it acknowledged that data from users’ interactions with its products may, depending on the settings, be used to improve its models.