Do you think they used an em-dash in the opening sentence because they’re trying to normalise the AI’s writing style, or…
Prism
131–140 of 543 posts
Re: Prism
#132Earlier 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.
> There could be a submission fee that would be fully reimbursed if the submission is actually accepted for publication. While well-intentioned, I think this is just gate-keeping. There are mountains of research that result in nothing interesting whatsoever (aside from learning about what doesn't work). And all of that is still valuable knowledge!
Maybe something like a "hierarchy/DAG? of trusted-peers", where groups like universities certify the relevance and correctness of papers by attaching their name and a global reputation score to it. When it's found that the paper is "undesirable" and doesn't pass a subsequent review, their reputation score deteriorates (with the penalty propagating along the whole review chain), in such a way that:
- the overall review model is distributed, hence scalable (everybody may play the certification game and build a reputation score while doing so) - trusted/established institutions have an incentive to keep their global reputation score high and either put a very high level of scrutiny to the review, or delegate to very reputable peers - "bad actors" are immediately punished and universally recognized as such - "bad groups" (such as departments consistently spamming with low quality research) become clearly identified as such within the greater organisation (the university), which can encourage a mindset of quality above quantity - "good actors within a bad group" are not penalised either because they could circumvent their "bad group" on the global review market by having reputable institutions (or intermediaries) certify their good work
There are loopholes to consider, like a black market of reputation trading (I'll pay you generously to sacrifice a bit of your reputation to get this bad science published), but even that cannot pay off long-term in an open system where all transactions are visible.
Incidentally, I think this may be a rare case where a blockchain makes some sense?
Re: Prism
#133Some things are worth doing the "hard way".
Re: Prism
#134This 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 flo…
Look at how much BS flooded psychology but had pretty ideas about p values and proper use of affect vs effect. None of that mattered.
Re: Prism
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am very sympathetic to your point of view, but let me offer another perspective. First off, you can already vibe-write slop papers with AI, even in LaTeX format--tools like Prism are not needed for that. On the other hand, it can really help researchers improve the quality of their papers. I'm someone who collaborates with many students and postdocs. My time is limited and I spend a lot of it on LaTeX drudgery that…
What the heck is the point of a reference you never read?
Re: Prism
#136This 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 flo…
I'm not in favor of letting AI do my thinking for me. Time will tell where Prism sits.
Re: Prism
#137From 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.
Re: Prism
#138This 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 flo…
I've wasted hours of my life trying to get Latex to format my journal articles to different journals' specifications. That's tedious typesetting that wastes my time. I'm all for AI tools that help me produce my thoughts with as little friction as possible. I'm not in favor of letting AI do my thinking for me. Time will tell where Prism sits.
Re: Prism
#139The 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
At the end of the day, it's all about the incentives. Can we have a world where we incentivize finding the truth rather than just publishing and getting citations?