The state of publishing in academic was already a dumpster fire, why lower the friction farther? It’s not like writing was the hard part. Give it two years max we will see hallucination citing hallucination, independent repeatability out the window
Prism
121–130 of 543 posts
Re: Prism
#122The Latent Space podcast just released a relevant episode today where they interviewed Kevin Weil and Victor Powell from, now, OpenAI, with some demos, background and context, and a Q&A.
The YouTube link is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2cBTVr8nxU
Re: Prism
#123Some things are worth doing the "hard way".
Re: Prism
#124It seems clear to me that this is about OpenAI getting telemetry and other training data with the intent of having their AI do scientific work independently down the line, and I'm very ambivalent about it.
Re: Prism
#125From 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 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.
Pay to review is common in Econ and Finance.
Re: Prism
#126This is terrible for Science.
I'm sorry, but publishing is hard, and it should be hard. There is a work function that requires effort to write a paper. We've been dealing with low quality mass-produced papers from certain regions of the planet for decades (which, it appears, are now producing decent papers too).
All this AI tooling will do is lower the effort to the point that complete automated nonsense will now flood in and it will need to be read and filtered by humans. This is already challenging.
Looking elsewhere in society, AI tools are already being used to produce scams and phishing attacks more effective than ever before.
Whole new arenas of abuse are now rife, with the cost of producing fake pornography of real people (what should be considered sexual abuse crime) at mere cents.
We live in a little microcosm where we can see the benefits of AI because tech jobs are mostly about automation and making the impossible (or expensive) possible (or cheap).
I wish more people would talk about the societal issues AI is introducing. My worthless opinion is that prism is not a good thing.
Re: Prism
#127From 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…
Why not filter out papers from people without credentials? And also publicly call them out and register them somewhere, so that their submission rights can be revoked by other journals and conferences after "vibe writing".
These acts just must have consequences so people stop doing them. You can use AI if you are doing it well but if you are wasting everyones time you should just be excluded from the discourse altogether.
Re: Prism
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be tricky, I often submitted to multiple high impact journals going down the list until someone accepted it. You try to ballpark where you can go but it can be worth aiming high. Maybe this isn't a problem and there should be payment for the efforts to screen the paper but then I would expect the reviewers to be paid for their time.
I mean your methodology also sounds suspect. You're just going down a list until it sticks. You don't care where it ends up (I'm sure within reason) just as long as it is accepted and published somewhere (again, within reason).
This is effectively standard across the board.
Re: Prism
#129From 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…
The comparison to make here is that a journal submission is effectively a pull request to humanities scientific knowlegde base. That PR has to be reviewed. We're already seeing the effects of this with open source code - the number of PR submissions have skyrocketed, overwhelming maintainers.
This is still a good step in a direction of AI assisted research, but as you said, for the moment it creates as many problems as it solves.
Re: Prism
#130Anybody 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.
A more apt example would have been to show finding a particular paper you want to cite, but you don’t want to be bothered searching your reference manager or Google Scholar.
E.g. “cite that paper from John Doe on lorem ipsum, but make sure it’s the 2022 update article that I cited in one of my other recent articles, not the original article”