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Prism

openai.com

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Re: Prism

#511

Post by mayhemducks »

ZpJuUuNaQ5 wrote: post #384
Perseids wrote: post #341

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…

>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 I just think it's silly to obsess over words like that. There are many words that take on different meanings in different contexts and can be associated with different events, ideas, products, time periods, etc. Would you feel…

You do realize that obsessing over words like that is a pretty major part of what programming and computer science is right? Linguistics is highly intertwined with computer science.

Re: Prism

#512

Post by LordDragonfang »

Perseids wrote: post #341

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…

Probably gonna get buried at the bottom of this thread, but:

There's a good chance they just asked GPT5.2 for a name. I know for a fact that when some of the OpenAI models get stuck in the "weird" state associated with LLM psychosis, three of the things they really like talking about are spirals, fractals, and prisms. Presumably, there's some general bias toward those concepts in the weights.

Re: Prism

#513

Post by JBorrow »

pickleRick243 wrote: post #221
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 curious if you'd be in favor of other forms of academic gate keeping as well. Isn't the lower quality overall of submissions (an ongoing trend with a history far pre-dating LLMs) an issue? Isn't the real question (that you are alluding to) whether there should be limits to the democratization of science? If my tone seems acerbic, it is only because I sense cognitive dissonance between the anti-AI stance common am…

I don't really understand how me saying that this tool isn't good for science as gatekeeping. The vibe-written papers that I am talking about have little-to-no valuable scientific content, and as such would always be rejected. It's just that it's way easier to produce something that _looks_ reasonable from a five-second glance than before, and that causes additional load on an already strained system.

I also don't understand your second paragraph at all.

Re: Prism

#514

Post by johanyc »

Perseids wrote: post #341

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…

I did not make the association at all

Re: Prism

#515

Post by observationist »

Perseids wrote: post #341

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…

I think it's probably just apparent to a small set of people; we're usually the ones yelling at the stupid cloud technologies that are ravaging online privacy and liberty, anyway. I was expecting some sort of OpenAI automated user data handling program, with the recent venture into adtech, but since it's a science project and nothing to do with surveillance and user data, I think it's fine.

If it was part of their adtech systems and them dipping their toe into the enshittification pool, it would have been a legendarily tone deaf project name, but as it is, I think it's fine.

Re: Prism

#516

Post by observationist »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #443
omnimus wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Obama and Biden chased him into a corner. They actually bragged about chasing him into Russia, because it was a convenient narrative to smear Snowden with after the fact.

It was Russia, or vanish into a black site, never to be seen or heard from again.

Re: Prism

#517

Post by SoftTalker »

andrewinardeer wrote: post #510
jll29 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the OP was talking about is the negative connotation that goes with the word; it's certainly a poor choice from a marketing point of view. You may say it's "silly to obsess", but it's like naming a product "Auschwitz" and saying "it's just a city name" -- it ignores the power of what Geffrey N. Leech called "associative meaning" in his taxonomy of "Seven Types of Meaning" (Semantics, 2nd. ed. 1989): speaking tha…

We had a local child day care provider call themselves ISIS. That was blast.

We had a local siding company call themselves "The Vinyl Solution" some people are just tone-deaf.

Re: Prism

#518

Post by teddyh »

Perseids wrote: post #341

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…

We used to have “SEO spam”, where people would try to create news (and other) articles associated with some word or concept to drown out some scandal associated with that same word or concept. The idea was that people searching on Google for the word would see only the newly created articles, and not see anything scandalous. This could be something similar, but aimed at future LLM’s trained on these articles. If LLM’s learn that the word “Prism” means a certain new thing in a surveillance context, the LLM’s will unlearn the older association, thereby hiding the Snowden revelations.

Re: Prism

#519

Post by matteocantiello »

At first I was a bit puzzled about why OpenAI would want to get involved in this somewhat niche project. Obviously, they don't give a damn about Overleaf’s market, which is a drop in the bucket. What OpenAI is after -- I think -- it’s a very specific kind of “training data.” Not Overleaf’s finished papers (those are already public), but the entire workflow. The path from a messy draft to a polished paper captures how ideas actually form: the back-and-forth, the false starts, the collaborative refinement at the frontier of knowledge. That’s an unusually distilled form of cognitive work, and I could imagine that's something one would want in order to train advanced models how to think.

Keeping LaTeX as the language is a feature, not a bug: it filters out noise and selects for people trained in STEM, who’ve already learned how to think and work scientifically.

Re: Prism

#520

Post by jackphilson »

adammarples wrote: post #463
vladms wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the ideas was to try to explain why is a problem to choose something, it is not a comparison of the intensity / importance. I am not sure you can make an argument of "other people are doing it too". Lots of people do things that it is not in their interest (ex: smoking, to pick the easy one). As others mentioned, I did not have the negative connotation related to the word prism either, but not sure how could…

But without the extremity of the Auschwitz example, it suddenly is not a problem. Prism is an unbelievably generic word and I had not even heard of the Snowdon one until now nor would I remember it if I had. Prism is one step away from "Triangle" in terms of how generic it is.

Triangle kind of reminds me of the Bermuda Triangle. You know how many people died there?
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