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Prism

openai.com

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Re: Prism

#101

Post by mrandish »

JBorrow wrote: post #32

From my perspective as a journal editor and a reviewer these kinds of tools cause many more problems than they actually solve. They make the 'barrier to entry' for submitting vibed semi-plausible journal articles much lower, which I understand some may see as a benefit. The drawback is that scientific editors and reviewers provide those services for free, as a community benefit. One example was a submission their und…

As a non-scientist (but long-time science fan and user), I feel your pain with what appears to be a layered, intractable problem.

> > who are looking to 'boost' their CV

Ultimately, this seems like a key root cause - misaligned incentives across a multi-party ecosystem. And as always, incentives tend to be deeply embedded and highly resistant to change.

Re: Prism

#102

Post by ezst »

maxkfranz wrote: post #78
JBorrow wrote: post #32

From my perspective as a journal editor and a reviewer these kinds of tools cause many more problems than they actually solve. They make the 'barrier to entry' for submitting vibed semi-plausible journal articles much lower, which I understand some may see as a benefit. The drawback is that scientific editors and reviewers provide those services for free, as a community benefit. One example was a submission their und…

I generally agree. On the other hand, the world is now a different place as compared to when several prominent journals were founded (1869-1880 for Nature, Science, Elsevier). The tacit assumptions upon which they were founded might no longer hold in the future. The world is going to continue to change, and the publication process as it stands might need to adapt for it to be sustainable.

As I understand it, the problem isn't publication or how it's changing over time, it's about the challenges of producing new science when the existing one is muddied in plausible lies. That warrants a new process by which to assess the inherent quality of a paper, but even if it comes as globally distributed, the cheats have a huge advantage considering the asymmetry between the effort to vibe produce vs. the tedious human review.

Re: Prism

#103

Post by adverbly »

ai_critic wrote: post #41

Anybody else notice that half the video was just finding papers to decorate the bibliography with? Not like "find me more papers I should read and consider", but "find papers that are relevant that I should cite--okay, just add those". This is all pageantry.

I chuckled at that part too!

Didn't even open a single one of the papers to look at them! Just said that one is not relevant without even opening it.

Re: Prism

#104

Post by ezst »

utilize1808 wrote: post #85
bloppe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there's a way to tax the frivolous submissions. There could be a submission fee that would be fully reimbursed iff the submission is actually accepted for publication. If you're confident in your paper, you can think of it as a deposit. If you're spamming journals, you're just going to pay for the wasted time. Maybe you get reimbursed for half as long as there are no obvious hallucinations.

Better yet, make a "polymarket" for papers where people can bet on which paper can make it, and rely on "expertise arbitrage" to punish spams.

Doesn't stop the flood, i.e. the unfair asymmetry between the effort to produce vs. effort to review.

Re: Prism

#106

Post by NewsaHackO »

olivia-banks wrote: post #52
ai_critic wrote: post #41

Anybody else notice that half the video was just finding papers to decorate the bibliography with? Not like "find me more papers I should read and consider", but "find papers that are relevant that I should cite--okay, just add those". This is all pageantry.

I've noticed this pattern, and it really drives me nuts. You should really be doing a comprehensive literature review before starting any sort of review or research paper. We removed the authorship of a a former co-author on a paper I'm on because his workflow was essentially this--with AI generated text--and a not-insignificant amount of straight-up plagiarism.

There is definitely a difference between how senior researchers and students go about making publications. To students, they get told basically what topic they should write a paper on or prepare data for, so they work backwards: try to write the paper (possibly some researching information to write the paper), then add references because they know they have to. For the actual researchers, it would be a complete waste of time/funding to start a project on a question that has already been answered before (and something that the grant reviewers are going to know has already been explored before), so in order to not waste their own time, they have to do what you said and actually conduct a comprehensive literature review before even starting the work.

Re: Prism

#107

Post by jcranmer »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #71
JBorrow wrote: post #32

From my perspective as a journal editor and a reviewer these kinds of tools cause many more problems than they actually solve. They make the 'barrier to entry' for submitting vibed semi-plausible journal articles much lower, which I understand some may see as a benefit. The drawback is that scientific editors and reviewers provide those services for free, as a community benefit. One example was a submission their und…

I'm scared that this type of thing is going to do to science journals what AI-generated bug reports is doing to bug bounties. We're truly living in a post-scarcity society now, except that the thing we have an abundance of is garbage, and it's drowning out everything of value.

The first casualty of LLMs was the slush pile--the unsolicited submission pile for publishers. We've since seen bug bounty programs and open source repositories buckle under the load of AI-generated contributions. And all of these have the same underlying issue: the LLM makes it easy to do things that don't immediately look like garbage, which makes the volume of submission skyrocket while the time-to-reject also goes up slightly because it passes the first (but only the first) absolute garbage filter.

Re: Prism

#108

Post by techblueberry »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #71
JBorrow wrote: post #32

From my perspective as a journal editor and a reviewer these kinds of tools cause many more problems than they actually solve. They make the 'barrier to entry' for submitting vibed semi-plausible journal articles much lower, which I understand some may see as a benefit. The drawback is that scientific editors and reviewers provide those services for free, as a community benefit. One example was a submission their und…

I'm scared that this type of thing is going to do to science journals what AI-generated bug reports is doing to bug bounties. We're truly living in a post-scarcity society now, except that the thing we have an abundance of is garbage, and it's drowning out everything of value.

There's this thing where all the thought leaders in software engineering ask "What will change about building about building a business when code is free" and while, there are some cool things, I've also thought, like it could have some pretty serious negative externalities? I think this question is going to become big everywhere - business, science, etc. which is like - Ok, you have all this stuff, but do is it valuable? Which of it actually takes away value?

Re: Prism

#109

Post by vessenes »

olivia-banks wrote: post #53
vessenes wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget replication!

I'm curious how you think AI would aide in this.

Tao’s doing a lot of related work in mathematics, so I can say that first of all literature search is a clearly valuable function frontier models offer.

Past that, A frontier LLM can do a lot of critiquing, a good amount of experiment design, a check on statistical significance/power claims, kibitz on methodology..likely suggest experiments to verify or disprove. These all seem pretty useful functions to provide to a group of scientists to me.

Re: Prism

#110

Post by sfink »

ai_critic wrote: post #41

Anybody else notice that half the video was just finding papers to decorate the bibliography with? Not like "find me more papers I should read and consider", but "find papers that are relevant that I should cite--okay, just add those". This is all pageantry.

Yes. That part of the video was straight-up "here's how to automate academic fraud". Those papers could just as easily negate one of your assumptions. What even is research if it's not using cited works?

"I know nothing but had an idea and did some work. I have no clue whether this question has been explored or settled one way or another. But here's my new paper claiming to be an incremental improvement on... whatever the previous state of understanding was. I wouldn't know, I haven't read up on it yet. Too many papers to write."

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