[deleted]
Prism
241–250 of 543 posts
Re: Prism
#242Re: Prism
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am I missing something? LaTeX is associated with slop now?
If a common AI tool produces latex documents, the association will be created yeah. Right now latex would be a high indicator of manual effort, right?
LaTeX is already standard in fields that have math notation, perhaps others as well. I guess the promise is that "formatting is automatic" (asterisk), so its popularity probably extends beyond math-heavy disciplines.
Re: Prism
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
The journal that I'm an editor for is 'diamond open access', which means we charge no submission fees and no publication fees, and publish open access. This model is really important in allowing legitimate submissions from a wide range of contributors (e.g. PhD students in countries with low levels of science funding). Publishing in a traditional journal usually costs around $3000.
Those journals are really good for getting practice in writing and submitting research papers, but sometimes they are already seen as less impactful because of the quality of accepted papers. At least where I am at, I don't think the advent of AI writing is going to affect how they are seen.
In the field of Programming Languages and Formal Methods, many of the top journals and conference proceedings are open access
Re: Prism
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am I missing something? LaTeX is associated with slop now?
If a common AI tool produces latex documents, the association will be created yeah. Right now latex would be a high indicator of manual effort, right?
> Right now latex would be a high indicator of manual effort, right?
...no?
Just one Google search for "latex editor" showed more than 2 in the first page.
It's not that different from using a markdown editor.
Re: Prism
#246I genuinely don’t see scientific journals and conferences continuing to last in this new world of autonomous agents, at least the same way that they used to be. As other top level posters have indicated the review portion of this is the limiting factor unless journal reviewers decide to utilize entirely automated review process, then they’re not gonna be able to keep up with what will increasingly be the most and bes…
If you think these types of tools are going to be generating "the most and best research coming out of any lab", then I have to assume you aren't actively doing any sort of research.
LLMs are undeniably great for interactive discussion with content IF you actually are up-to-date with the historical context of a field, the current "state-of-the-art", and have, at least, a subjective opinion on the likely trajectories for future experimentation and innovation.
But, agents, at best, will just regurgitate ideas and experiments that have already been performed (by sampling from a model trained on most existing research literature), and, at worst, inundate the literature with slop that lacks relevant context, and, as a negative to LLMs, pollute future training data. As of now, I am leaning towards "worst" case.
And, just to help with the facts, your last comment is unfortunately quite inaccurate. Science is one of the best government investments. For every $1.00 dollar given to the NIH in the US, $2.56 of economic activity is estimated to be generated. Plus, science isn't merely a public venture. The large tech labs have huge R&D because the output from research can lead to exponential returns on investment.
Re: Prism
#247Not an academic, but I used LaTeX for years and it doesn’t feel like what future of publishing should use. It’s finicky and takes so much markup to do simple things. A lab manager once told me about a study that people who used MS Word to typeset were more productive, and I can see that…
Academic here. Working on MS Word after years of using LaTeX is... hard. With LaTex I can be reassured that the formatting will be 95% fine and the 5% remaining will come down to taste ("why doesn't this Figure show in this page?") while in Word I'm constantly fighting the layout - delete one line? Your entire paragraph is now bold. Changed the font of the entire text? No, that one paragraph ignores you. Want to delete that line after that one Table? F you, you're not. There's a reason why this video joke [1] got 14M views.
And then I need an extra tool for dealing with bibliography, change history is unpredictable (and, IMO, vastly inferior to version control), and everything gets even worse if I open said Word file in LibreOffice.
LaTeX' syntax may be hard, but Word actively fights me during writing.
[1] Moving a photo in Microsoft Word - https://www.instagram.com/jessandquinn/reel/DIMkKkqODS5/
Re: Prism
#248They seem to have copied Cursor in hijacking ⌘Y shortcut for "Yes" instead of Undo.
In what applications is ⌘Y Undo and not ⌘Z? Is ⌘Y just a redundant alternative?
Re: Prism
#249From 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…
If I may be the Devil's advocate, I'm not sure I fully agree with "The hard part always has been, and always will be, understanding the research context (what's been published before) and producing novel and interesting work (the underlying research)".
Plenty of researchers hate writing and will only do it at gunpoint. Or rather, delegate it all to their underlings.
I don't see an issue with generative writing in principle. The Devil is in the details, but I don't see this as much different from "hey grad student, write me this paper". And generative writing already exists as copy-paste, which makes up like 90% of any random paper given the incrementality of it all.
I was initially a little indignated by the "find me some plausible refs and stick them in the paper" section of the video but, then again, isn't this what most people already do? Just copy-paste the background refs from the colleague's last paper introduction and maybe add one from a talk they saw in the meantime, plus whatever the group & friends produced since then.
My experience is most likely skewed (as all are), but I haven't met a permanent researcher that wrote their own papers yet, and most grad students and postdocs hate writing. Literally the only times I saw someone motivated to write papers (in a masochistic way) were just before applying to a permanent position or while wrapping up their PhD.
Onto your point, though, I agree this is somewhat worrisome in that, by reaction, the barrier to entry might rise by way of discriminating based on credentials.
Re: Prism
#250They compare it to software development but there is such a crucial difference to software development: by and large, software is an order of magnitude easier to verify than it is to create. By comparison, reviewing a vibe generated manuscript will be MUCH more work to verify than a piece of software with equivalent complexity. On top of that, review of academic literature is largely outsourced to the academic community for free. There is no model to support it that scales to an increased volume of output.
I would not like to be a publisher right now facing the enslaught of thousands and thousands of slop generated articles, trying to find reviewers for them all.