If it makes you feel better, I've known the author personally for over ten years, and he is both a human being and an excellent teacher. I'm about as confident as I could imagine being that he wrote this book himself. (In order for this to completely reassure you, you of course have to trust me, but I thought I'd add my vote of confidence just in case it helps even a little.)

This book aside, though, the fact that writing is no longer definitive evidence of human thought is one of the things I dislike the most about the LLM era. I very much share your sadness about that.

I feel the need to be clear; I have no reason to suspect the author of using AI; and am even a bit irritated for the author that I have to entertain these suspicions writ large now. It is unfair to the author who hasn’t done anything to warrant that suspicion, but it’s the world we live in at the moment.

I vocalize this feeling I have, not because the author has done anything to warrant it, but here, in this forum, we commonly have folks saying “so what if it’s AI?”, and by bringing up these feelings we have around the industry, we can have the conversation and (hopefully) have other folks think twice about whether they would use AI to write their book.

I want to read this book and have added it to my list of things to read; and your vouching for the author does help. One underlying issue I have (that is a me problem) is that I know nothing about this particular area, and therefore know nothing about the experts in this area, so I rely on human vouching.

Well, if we're going to have the conversation: so what if it were AI? Shouldn't the question be around correctness and good pedagogy? Shouldn't the question always be about vouching for those things? If it's actually done well (e.g. they were able to generate better illustrations than they otherwise could've), why exactly should someone think twice?

The author put his name and reputation to it. If it's excellent work, it's excellent work. If it's slop, it's slop.

I'm not the OP, but I can give my answer to this question, or at least one of my answers.

This book is presented as being written by a human. (In this case, a human I happen to know, which would add another dimension to my complaint, so let's imagine that weren't the case.) Maybe someday we'll live in a world where sticking a person's name at the top of a book doesn't carry the implication that they wrote the words in the book. That would make me sad for other reasons, but in any event, we don't live in that world right now, so for now, if you put a person's name on your book, you are claiming that that person wrote the book. If that's not true, you are lying, and like most people, I don't like being lied to.

Why does putting your name on it have to imply you wrote every word, and not instead, just attach your reputation to it, and say that you stand behind the words that are in it, regardless of who/what wrote the words? If we look at things that way, we can continue as we always have evaluating the content, pedagogy, etc. and associate good and bad content, pedagogy, etc with the author and know that when we see that author's name we'll know what we should expect (regardless of who wrote the individual words).

I'm imagining something more like the way we treat movie directors. When I see Michael Bay vs. Quentin Tarantino, I don't think that those people wrote the film, or set up every camera shot in minute detail, or designed the costumes, etc. but I know that they had a hand in arranging for all of that and it will all ultimately come through with their unique stamp on it.

You're proposing a new way that we could treat authorship that's different from how we currently treat authorship. There's an argument to be had about whether that would be better than our current system. My vote would be no, but I'm not claiming it's obvious one way or the other.

But regardless of whether you think your new system would be better, it's not the current system. Surely the question of whether someone is lying by putting their name on a book they didn't write can't depend on some hypothetical future change to the meaning of authorship that hasn't happened yet.

What do you mean "the" or "our" current system? That's entirely your interpretation, and we've always had a sliding scale of "non-authorship" from editors to ghostwriters. AI models are the same; you can use them in a heavily directed way (basically, as an editor, or in an outsourcing capacity for e.g. illustrations), or in a hands off way that you just endorse.

> Maybe someday we'll live in a world where sticking a person's name at the top of a book doesn't carry the implication that they wrote the words in the book.

Not even an AI thing, we don't. Ghost writing has been going on for centuries.

I don't like that! I agree it's dishonest and I wish we lived in a world where having been exposed employing a ghostwriter is a disgrace no public figure can come back from. I don't like that AI has made it worse, either. At least with ghost writing there are some contexts (politicians, celebrity bios) where you might suspect it, but in most you won't.

But, we do live in that world right now.

Yeah, I'm also not a big fan of ghostwriting in the domains where it's prevalent. For what it's worth, though, academic writing is very much not one of those domains: taking LLM's out of it, if ten years ago it had turned out that the "author" of a math textbook like this one had paid someone else to write the whole book for them, that would be considered major academic misconduct and that person's reputation would have been pretty severely damaged. I do think it makes sense to take the norms of a particular subset of the publishing world into account when thinking about what a reasonable reader expects when they see someone's name on a book.

Human expertise and appeal to authority have long been a proxy for correctness and soundness in a body of work.

It's not a perfect proxy, but I'm usually going to trust a domain expert over the confident idiot who constantly lies to me, hides and downplays mistakes, and flits around opposing positions like a drunken moth.

At this time, if I see a text is AI generated, I have to assume it is unsound and possibly even nefarious. There is way too much information assailing my daily life that I have no other rational choice.

I answered this question elsewhere in this thread; here’s a link to it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50273553

That doesn't really answer anything though. There are tons of human cranks out there too who are perfectly willing to spend tons of time on their "theories." Humans make errors too. If you don't have a way to evaluate the source material or some endorsement from someone you have a reason to trust, then AI doesn't change that. If you do have an endorsement (e.g. Terence Tao says some AI book is extremely well done, or puts out his own book that he openly used AI to write), then why would you discard it because AI?

> The author put his name and reputation to it.

For at least the past 5 years, Amazon.com has been completely flooded with throwaway brand names churned out from random sequences of characters selling white-labelled products. The ones that do poorly get discarded and replaced, and the ones that find traction get to climb the rankings.

Do you think the same doesn't apply to "authors" of books, social media posts, and even academic papers in 2026? It doesn't matter if someone's staked their reputation unless their reputation is already widely known and trusted to begin with.

Well, this person claims on their website to have a PhD in math from CMU and to have taught the topic at multiple state universities. You could dig some into whether that's true, and then rely on the reputation of the named institutions if you don't know anything about them.

Just like reputation already worked. People have associations with each other. People endorse each other. Endorsements carry some transitive weight (I suppose you could use graph theory to model this). This has nothing to do with AI. Yes, Amazon is full of constantly changing "brands" with no reputation. That is different from a person or company that does have a consistent reputation that you can look up, even if you hadn't heard of them until today. Even Amazon also has e.g. Samsung or Asus if you don't want to buy AHIKJASFDIUHER.

> For at least the past 5 years, Amazon.com has been completely flooded with throwaway brand names churned out from random sequences of characters selling white-labelled products.

The last time I looked into someone's complaint on HN about Chinese companies setting themselves up on Amazon with nonsense data and no way to contact them nor any theoretical method of holding them to account for misbehavior, I went to the product link the complaining comment provided and discovered that it was offered by a company whose registered place of business (listed on Amazon!) was obviously the poor owner's personal home address.

I don't mind if it is written by a human or a machine, but AI has a way of writing things that are exasperating, with unnecessary detours around the point that have lately made me very intolerant of stuff for which in the past I had more patience. As soon as I see content that reads like AI slop, I feel like I am wasting my time watching paint dry, and I throw it away.

It's also often wrong.

But also, I would like money I spend to go to people, not tokens.

Even though I have no idea who you are, I appreciate your vote of confidence in the author. It matters. Thank you

You know this is easily verifiable right…. I just put 10 random pages into Pangram and they all came back 100% human. And now I feel bad for making an even greater proportion of comments on this thread not about graph theory.

How reliable are these test though?

My anecdotal experience has been that is is very reliable on inputs over 500 words. There are a number of third party evaluations that corroborate. Pangram is pretty easy to test for yourself if you are a skeptic.

Pangram is very good if you can provide enough text, in my experience.

I wouldn't use it as a 100% infallible AI detector when the stakes are high (accusing someone of cheating) but it's very good at detecting AI generated text when you can drop large sections of text into it.

Putting aside whether or not the author used AI to write this - the concern here is that the content is accurate and correct, right? So suppose they did use AI to write it - your end goal is actually the same - you want a trustworthy, accurate, source of information.

In this sense AI does not actually detract from that - so long as there IS an author associated to the book, that author can build a reputation for thoroughly reviewed and high quality textbooks. So in the end, some authors will be known for a reputation for making good books, and the use of AI should give us access to a larger quantity of books, addressing more and more niche topics, for lower costs. So, this should be a good thing for education?

I'm very much just writing my thoughts down, but curious to know if others agree or disagree with this.

> the concern here is that the content is accurate and correct, right?

I think there's more, we just take it for granted because it's usually included. Imagine a teacher--perhaps a whimsical one in a Roald Dahl story--who is always very accurate and correct. However, somehow they always present things in a way that cripples students' future progress and understanding.

Most human communication involves some level of simulating the mind you expect was/will-be at the other end. This aspect becomes extra-important when teaching, because teaching about trying to change how that student-mind operates.

So the facts being imparted are secondary, and in many cases carefully incorrect facts must be used before you can introduce better ones.

> the concern here is that the content is accurate and correct, right?

> In this sense AI does not actually detract from that [...] that author can build a reputation for thoroughly reviewed and high quality textbooks.

The issue is a lot of the AI generated books out there aren't carefully reviewed and it being AI written is an early sign it's crap at the moment, and it's expensive cognitively to build a list of "trusted authors" or to know when searching if you're finding true reviews by people who can meaningfully evaluate the content of the book or if you hit an AstroTurf post fluffing the author.

The other indicator and thing that puts at least myself off is that if the author used AI significantly in the process they didn't care enough about writing it before to put the real human effort into writing it so the chances it's worth spending my real human time reading is low.

I spot-checked a few random chapters, and it looks clearly human-written to me. But I share your general worry.

The author seems to have published math papers (as one can see on DBLP and other websites) and a PhD in maths. It gives me confidence that it's written by a human and also reading chapter 1 and chapter 2 I think there is a human behind it, not an LLM.

I get your sentiment, though the problem is older than AI, the convenience and market penetration has just ramped up the visibility in this arena.

Many books pre-ai were garbage but not at the rate they could be today. If anything people operate on greater discretion now than in the past because even the worst garbage still had a non-trivial barrier to entry, either sitting down to regurgitate your own garbage or paying someone to make some garbage for you.

There's also some historic precedence of this, the rise of Photoshop/CG and digital manipulation certainly led to a "is this photo real" to similar effect despite manipulations going back to the origins of photography. That acute concern was not as prevalent in my mind before editing became common and accessible.

While the author and book here seem trustworthy, the issue is real and likely more upon all of us. Nothing that we output will escape the same scrutiny, at least for a while until we will probably have own dedicated AI to scrutinize everything that gets in front of us

There has been plenty of crap released in the past, and even in the AI age we should be able to look at the same signals to filter through it today.

I've asked myself this question as well.

Where I've landed -- once I get away from the distaste for load-bearing or a comment mentioning "spine" -- is that if the idea pushes me forward, challenges me towards improving, or otherwise informs, I'm okay with AI assisted writing.

I'm not okay with formulaic garbled nonsense, that annoys me!

I have just taken this in stride but it has struck me a few times recently that everything I see now.. I basically have to classify it as to be immediately discarded or worth my time to even begin reading, and even if I do continue reading then I still have to be constantly evaluating if a person bothered to struggle with (write) it or not.

Quite frankly this is.. fucking terrible? Even worse, the end of something for humanity..?

Perhaps we’ll reach a point where humans might have to record themselves writing the things and publish this next to the work itself to prove it was human made.

IMO if i can learn from/enjoy the content then it makes no difference who/what wrote it. I'll even pay for it if I feel the content is equal in value to the price.

This is what I'm grappling with myself. I'm building out a bunch of materials for things I'm learning and feel like others can benefit from my trudging through and correcting or getting AI clarification.

I think we're quickly getting to a point where AI is going to be able to do a better job teaching things than humans can (especially stuff with heavy associations with paper/screens, like programming and math). AI can augment for personal styles and spin up whole entire educational widgets on demand. Human's can't scale like that.

I don't think there is educational worth in an novice publishing the outputs from their chats.

I think there is some worth in having someone knowledgeable using AI to generate educational material, although it will be in my opinion, of less use than if that knowledgeable person wrote the material by hand.

For example, many professors in universities have started generating slides or even assignments using AI. A knowledgeable teacher who cares about their students outcomes can generate better material.

I see a perfectly good, non-AI submission. Open the comments, and the top comment is about AI.

Can we not do this? I understand your sentiment, but ... can we not do this?

Reading through the first chapter, I got the feeling that it is more human than a lot of the books you might find on O'Reilly or wherever. I totally support the use of AI to help with organizing material in better ways or creating different modalities for representation. I really hate when the book is very clearly just copy pasting the output of the LLM.

Also, saw your comment response, I do feel this very same guarding and unfortunately my instinct is to assume the content is AI, which is a disservice to all the people who are putting their hard effort into putting out quality things.

Let's say the book was written by AI. Can you you explain what makes you less excited about this stuff?

Like is there a concrete issue with the book you have?

There was not a single real tangable way of determining this before AI Slop.

For sure it was less to review, less options but still.

So what did you use? I used things like Reviews, skimming through, getting a referal through a blog or hn and buying from reputational sources.

HN is a filter. Same as all the other things we have.

This is what we are supposed to have book and movie reviewers for. Just to check for slop regardless if the slop is AI or human.

But who reviews the reviewers?

What is the problem if it is AI written? Properly guided AI writes better than most human expositors.

Because it will absolutely have hidden errors.

Thank goodness human books never have hidden errors.

There are a few issues if it’s AI-written/edited/drafted:

1. AI generated text works off of whatever model it came from, whatever prompt was used, and probabilities. It’s been described as a “next token predictor” and that, for the purposes of this answer, is how I’m describing it as well. First problem: it’s only as good as the above.

2. Because of the above, its accuracy relies on probabilities. It can confidently give me wrong information, and as someone who would read this book to learn a topic I don't already know, I have no frame of reference to know whether I’m being fed accurate information.

3. Since it greatly speeds up the time it takes to physically write material, there is a possibility the author didn’t closely vet the information provided by the LLM as a next token predictor. That means it could be wrong in subtle ways, and the only way for me to know is to rely on knowledge I don’t have.

4. Had AI not been used, I could conceivably go on the past work of the author, rely on the person who has the expertise who wrote the forward, or the fact that physically writing a book takes prohibitively long enough that the dopamine from having written a book doesn’t outweigh the amount of time it takes, and if you are going to take months to years to write a book, you’re going to not want that effort to be in vain. You’re going to do your diligence and not just “wing it”.

AI makes it relatively trivial to appear knowledgeable and to get that dopamine rush from saying “I’m an author” and appearing to be an expert in a field without being an expert in a field. For some, that temptation is too great and there’s no way to know without the passage of time. Time for folks to review the book who know the subject matter. Time for reviews. Time for folks to put signs up that say “don’t trust this material.” In the meantime we still have that content out there, further infecting new AI models and people into believing it’s accurate.

That’s why the use of AI is dangerous, and is especially dangeorus without disclosure.

Sure, but you can build an agentic system which verifies outputs and fact corrects, with probably better accuracy than a human would.

As well, if people were a bit less anti-AI then maybe we can get disclaimers that things are written by AI that don't immediately torpedo any value the writing has.

As a professional mathematician it seems that AI is already at the point where, when well guided, it both does better research and writes better exposition than run if the mill mathematicians.

Well guided is a qualifier that matters.

In my opinion, doing good mathematics is very different from writing good exposition.

I have observed that models are not able to effectively come down to a human level. They are mediocre at approximating what a first-time reader would want to know. If you will forgive the anthropomorphization, they are not very empathetic. In this book for example, the author pauses the flow of thought with countless little anecdotes, anticipating where the reader might have a question or want to know more.

Of course, a well-guided AI is capable of anything a human is capable of. But is that not tautological?

I’d be surprised to see current LLMs write as well (and as non-annoying) as the writing in this book.

> What is the problem if it is AI written? Properly guided AI writes better than most human expositors.

I don't understand why HN cannot ever say the first sentence without the second one.

Most people agree that using AI for research or finding better words is fine, but then can't upvote or have a meaningful conversation because of the performative politics and wild delusions about a scifi future.

Dude, all we have with LLMs is an NLP search engine. Get over it. It's been around half a decade of this nonsense. There is no "step change". There is no "hockey stick" curve. The models have not "dramatically improved compared to last year" regardless of what year it currently is. There is no big bad overlord coming for you. Nobody is getting replaced by AI. Even frontier AI can't replace local AI. It's just the logical next step towards better search that assumes you want the "I'm feeling lucky" button a little too often.

That's not a fair comparison: I choose what I read not from the middle of humanity. I choose skilled writers. They write far better than AI. I'm through the opening volley of this book, and it is far better than the best AI prose I've read.

Tangent: I use AI for code, but I've had to ban it from writing readmes and doc comments; the AI models I've used produce text I'm unable to parse, and assume my readers would not be able to either.

I think a lot of it actually comes down to the perception of where the content came from. I brainstorm and riff with AI all the time, but I know what I am communicating with, I don't get the same sense of ickyness. Blogs and books and all these things that are claimed be to written by a human, but are actually just AI, is frustrating. Honestly, the content may be perfectly fine, but I feel something irritates humans when they think they have been deceived.