Comment by avs733

That aspect alone would/should be unthinkable to any serious academic. Authorship reflects who did the work and changing it for business competition reasons should be a red flag for multiple different reasons. They include, the sheer tactlessness of treating a major theoretical advancement as a competitive posturing first, the norms of academia second, and all the misunderstandings of the culture of the disciplines culture that people will now suspect are hiding beneath the visible surface (insert topography joke).

Math as a field is fairly unique even in how they list authorship. It was long the norm that authorship to be alphabetical because the idea of first, second, senior etc authorship is harder to define than many other fields.

“The stated rationale for alphabetical order is that it treats co-authorship as intellectually joint work: every listed author’s name carries equal weight, and no one has to negotiate, or be seen to negotiate, over billing. That is a genuine advantage over position-coded conventions, where disputes over who is “first author” are one of the most common sources of authorship conflict in fields that use them” [0]

That norm is changing, slowly, but one option people are pursuing is notable: randomized author order. Their is a perception that alphabetical is too biased…that’s the world OpenAI is stepping into when they make that offer of authorship to one scholar with a demand that he exclude his partner.

I can’t speak to the facts of anything else in this, but if a grad student came to me and said someone made them that offer, I would tell them to run and if they were brave report it.

[0] a to the point lay description of the history of math authorship can be found here: https://casrai.org/guides/mathematics-alphabetical-authorshi...