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If I oppose you shooting a bunch of cannon balls at my house, I'm not canceling ballistics, I'm canceling your use of ballistics in this particular way.
"Cancelling" math would be something like what the Pythagoreans did (though cancel isn't the best verb) when trying to suppress the proof/discovery that root 2 isn't rational (please let's not get bogged down in the historicity of my characterization of this particular example, it's an analogy). To consider mathematical facts themselves as dangerous or harmful. These people didn't cancel machine learning or convergence proofs or gradient descent. They cancelled an application of machine learning. If I say that a Chinese style social credit system or all encompassing surveillance infrastructure are bad or should not be implemented, I'm not cancelling the math. Just the application area.
This isn't analogous to the actual situation in any way, though. It's more akin to you opposing anyone shooting any cannons at any direction. In which case it'd be fairly appropriate to claim that you are canceling ballistics.
The software that generates rap lyrics is a bunch of maths. More specifically, it's an algorithm that takes some set of inputs (I'm guessing some sets of strings and some random numbers?) and produces some set of outputs (in the form of a string of lyrics). It's a bunch of maths much like how the proof that the square root of 2 is irrational is a bunch of maths. In my hypothetical "what-if" scenario that we are talking about, the "cancelers" have a problem with this bunch of maths being used whatsoever, regardless of the characteristics of the individuals involved in creating or running the rap-generation software. This is accurately described as "canceling a bunch of maths," rather than the social context around the usage of such.
I thought they just want to cancel the use case of training an AI to rap about tough black life in the hood while throwing about the word nigga. I believed they would be fine with I don't know an AI that explains things to blind people or summarizes news articles or generates sport news from the match records or whatever.
Yes, but this conversation isn't about an AI that explains things to blind people or summarizes news articles or generates sport news from the match records or whatever. It's about a piece of software that generates rap lyrics about tough black life in the hood while throwing about the word nigga. That specific piece of software - as in, the software that generates those rap lyrics because it has been trained - is a bunch of maths. In my hypothetical, "they" want to "cancel" that. No, they don't want to "cancel" the entire notion of training AI to do stuff (which would also be a type of "canceling" a bunch of maths). They want to "cancel" one particular instantiation of that concept, which is itself a bunch of maths. They don't want anyone using that specific piece of software that generates rap lyrics - i.e. a bunch of maths.
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