Prism • Hacker News Board

Re: Prism

#71

Post by InsideOutSanta » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 8:49 PM UTC

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 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

#72

Post by lispisok » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 8:49 PM UTC

Way too much work having AI generate slop which gets dumped on a human reviewer to deal with. Maybe switch some of that effort into making better review tools.

Re: Prism

#73

Post by sva_ » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 8:49 PM UTC

> In 2025, AI changed software development forever. In 2026, we expect a comparable shift in science,

I can't wait

Re: Prism

#74

Post by maqp » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 8:50 PM UTC

kaonwarb wrote: post #7

postalcoder wrote: post #4

Very unfortunately named. OpenAI probably (and likely correctly) estimated that 13 years is enough time after the Snowden leaks to use "prism" for a product but, for me, the word is permanently tainted.

I suspect that name recognition for PRISM as a program is not high at the population level.

2027: OpenAI Skynet - "Robots help us everywhere, It's coming to your door"

Re: Prism

#75

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 8:50 PM UTC

verdverm wrote: post #67

I remember, something like a month ago, Altman twit'n that they were stopping all product work to focus on training. Was that written on water? Seems like they have only announced products since and no new model trained from scratch. Are they still having pre-training issues?

[deleted]

Re: Prism

#76

Post by olivia-banks » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 8:51 PM UTC

noitpmeder wrote: post #70

olivia-banks wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how you think AI would aide in this.

Replicate this Ok! Here's

I don't think you understand what replication means in this context.

Re: Prism

#77

Post by AlexCoventry » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 8:51 PM UTC

I don't see the use. You can easily do everything shown in the Prism intro video with ChatGPT already. Is it meant to be an overleaf killer?

Re: Prism

#78

Post by maxkfranz » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 8:51 PM UTC

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 generally agree.

On the other hand, the world is now a different place as compared to when several prominent journals were founded (1869-1880 for Nature, Science, Elsevier). The tacit assumptions upon which they were founded might no longer hold in the future. The world is going to continue to change, and the publication process as it stands might need to adapt for it to be sustainable.

Re: Prism

#79

Post by black_puppydog » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 8:51 PM UTC

ai_critic wrote: post #41

Anybody 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.

Plus, this practice (just inserting AI-proposed citations/sources) is what has recently been the front-runner of some very embarrassing "editing" mistakes, notably in reports from public institutions. Now OpenAI lets us do pageantry even faster! <3

Re: Prism

#80

Post by crazygringo » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 8:52 PM UTC

markbao wrote: post #37

Not 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…

100% completely agreed. It's not the future, it's the past.

Typst feels more like the future: https://typst.app/

The problem is that so many journals require certain LaTeX templates so Typst often isn't an option at all. It's about network effects, and journals don't want to change their entire toolchain.