Authorship in the AI Age
The authorship of a recent paper on the Erdős Unit Distance Problem raises questions about the role of AI in academic publishing. OpenAI is credited as the author, but this situation highlights the challenges of attributing authorship to AI tools. The article discusses the implications of AI contributions and the need for clear guidelines in future publications.
- ▪The Erdős Unit Distance Problem paper lists only 'OpenAI' as an author.
- ▪Most publishers follow the Committee on Publication Ethics' stance that AI tools cannot be listed as authors.
- ▪OpenAI's paper does not list the model as an author but credits the organization instead.
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Story provenance
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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 | Computationalcomplexity |
| Canonical URL | https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2026/05/authorship-in-ai-age.html |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 15:15:19 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T15:28:01.742Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T15:28:01.742Z |
| 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 | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| 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
The technical paper for the Erdős Unit Distance Problem lists only "OpenAI" as an author. When Bill posted on Sunday about the Erdős distance problems, he mentioned the names of OpenAI researchers who prompted and checked the proof. Sebastien Bubeck of OpenAI reached out directly and later as a comment saying this was really an OpenAI-wide achievement, and we shouldn't just single out people at the end of the funnel. I agree with Bubeck for this paper, but it brings up some challenging authorship issues for the future.Most publishers follow the position of the Committee on Publication Ethics that AI tools cannot be listed as an author of a paper.AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Computationalcomplexity.
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