451–460 of 543 posts
I'm dumbfounded they chose the name of the infamous NSA mass surveillance program revealed by Snowden in 2013. And even more so that there is just one other comment among 320 pointing this out [1]. Has the technical and scientific community in the US already forgotten this huge breach of trust? This is especially jarring at a time where the US is burning its political good-will at unprecedented rate (at least unprece…
Previously, this existed as crixet.com [0]. At some point it used WASM for client-side compilation, and later transitioned to server-side rendering [1][2]. It now appears that there will be no option to disable AI [3]. I hope the core features remain available and won’t be artificially restricted. Compared to Overleaf, there were fewer service limitations: it was possible to compile more complex documents, share proj…
It seems bad for OpenAI to make this about latex documents, which will be now associated, visually, with AI slop. The opposite of what anyone wants really. Nobody wants you to know they used a chatbot!
Also yes, LaTeX being source code it's much easier to get an AI to genere LaTeX than integrate into MS Word.
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I for one hope not to live in a world where academic journals fall out of favor and are replaced by vibe-coded papers by citizen scientists with inflated egos from one too many “you’re absolutely right!” Claude responses.
Me neither, but what you present is a false dichotomy. Science used to be a past time of the wealthy elites, it became a profession. By opening up it up progrss was accelerated. Same will happen when publication will be made more open and accessible.
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Is it at all possible to have a policy that bans the submission of any AI written text, or text that was written with the assistance of AI tools? I understand that this would, by necessity, be under an "honor system" but maybe it could help weed out papers not worth the time?
this is probably a net negative as there are many very good scientists with not very strong English skills. the early years of LLMs (when they were good enough to correct grammar but not enough to generate entire slop papers) were an equalizer. we may end up here but it would be unfortunate.
why would it be upon them to submit in English, when instead reviewers and readers can themselves use a LLM translator to read the paper ?
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Like it would matter for any of the revelations. And like he would have other choices to not go to prison. Look at how it worked out for Assange.
Assange became a Russian asset *while* in a whistleblowing-related job. (And he is also the reason why Snowden ended up in Russia. Though it's possible that the flight plan they had was still the best one in that situation.)
I am increasingly wondering what there remains of the supposed superiority of the Western system if we're willing to compromise on everything to suit our political ends.
The point was supposed to be that the truth is worth having out there for the purpose of having an informed public, no matter how it was (potentially) obtained.
In the end, we may end up with everything we fear about China but worse infrastructure and still somehow think we're better.
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…
It was already a problem 25 years ago when I did my Ph.D., and I don't think things changed that much since then.
This encourages researchers to publish barely valuable results, or to cut one articles into multiple ones with small variations to increase their number of publications. Also publishers creating more conferences and more journals to respond to the need that researchers have to publish.
I remember many experienced professors telling me cynically about this, about all the techniques they had to blow up one small finding into many articles.
Anyway - research slop started way before AI. It's probably going to make the problem worse, but the root issue have been there for a long time.
The solution is currently quite focused on life science needs but if you're curious, check us out!
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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 publish journals already exist.
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 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…
If I can't have that, the next best thing is a helper while I'm at the keyboard my damn self.
>Why LaTeX is the bottleneck: scientists spend hours aligning diagrams, formatting equations, and managing references—time that should go to actual science, not typesetting
This is supposed to be only a temporary situation until people recover from the cutbacks of the 1970's, and a more comprehensive number of scientists once again have their own secretary.
Looks like the engineers at Crixet were tired of waiting.