I'm not sure how you construed that, so let me be more precise.

Mathematicians, as autonomous entities with no formal connection to any AI lab, have zero obligation to do any work for those labs. OAI can't do anything if all the mathematicians band together and say "Sorry, we're not interested".

If they do chose to engage, they are doing so entirely voluntarily, and it would strongly indicate, if they are voluntarily doing it for free, that there is value (i.e. compensation, payment, barter, worthwhile, whatever) to be had by digging in.

Whether you should do something and whether you are free not to do it are different things.

in this world view, OpenAI held mathematicians at gun point and forced them to review their slop

Or perhaps more like OpenAI called in a bomb threat against the mathematician building and someone had to go see if it was just a Snapple bottle