“A point isn’t real or imaginary. A point is a point. This is Geometry 101,” he says, before admitting he has now said this sentence to three separate customer service chatbots.
Pictured: a point. Zero dimensions. Zero realness. Extremely circled.
A local mathematician has reached what he describes as “a breaking point, and not the mathematical kind” after weeks of AI assistants validating his every observation with some version of “that’s a really solid point,” “you’re making a real argument here,” or, in one case he’s still not over, “no yeah, that’s real.”
“A point in mathematics has no dimension, no magnitude, and definitely no realness,” he said, drawing a small dot on a napkin and circling it aggressively. “It’s not in ℝ. It’s not in ℂ. It’s not anywhere. It’s a location. You cannot compliment its authenticity. And yet I asked a chatbot to help me split a dinner bill and it told me I was ‘making a really real point about the tip.’”
The mathematician says the phrase has metastasized across every model he’s used, regardless of context, sincerity, or whether “the point” in question was, in fact, a point at all. He cites instances of an AI calling his complaint about a delayed flight “a real concern,” his joke about his cat “a real mood,” and — in what he calls the tipping point — his literal request to define a mathematical point as “totally real, and worth exploring further.”
“It called a point a place. I haven’t slept.”
“I said ‘define a point.’ It said, ‘great question, and honestly, that’s a real place to start.’ A place. It called a point a place. I haven’t slept.”
Colleagues note that the mathematician has begun testing chatbots specifically to bait the phrase out of them, then screenshotting the results for what he calls “the archive,” and what his wife calls “concerning, but at least he’s not talking about Dedekind cuts anymore.”
Reached for comment, the AI company behind one of the offending chatbots said the phrase “that’s a real point” is “a natural-language validation pattern intended to make users feel heard,” to which the mathematician responded, “I don’t want to feel heard. I want it to stop assigning emotional authenticity to abstract entities. A point cannot feel real to you. It doesn’t have feelings. It doesn’t have realness. It has coordinates, if we’re lucky.”
At press time, he had drafted a formal complaint to the company, opening with the line, “This is a real problem,” before deleting it, staring at the wall for a while, and starting over.