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Posted by meetpateltech 1/27/2026

Prism(openai.com)
781 points | 524 commentspage 4
reassess_blind 1/27/2026|
Do you think they used an em-dash in the opening sentence because they’re trying to normalise the AI’s writing style, or…
MattDaEskimo 1/27/2026||
What's the goal here?

There was an idea of OpenAI charging commission or royalties on new discoveries.

What kind of researcher wants to potentially lose, or get caught up in legal issues because of a free ChatGPT wrapper, or am I missing something?

engineer_22 1/27/2026|
> Prism is free to use, and anyone with a ChatGPT account can start writing immediately.

Maybe it's cynical, but how does the old saying go? If the service is free, you are the product.

Perhaps, the goal is to hoover up research before it goes public. Then they use it for training data. With enough training data they'll be able to rapidly identify breakthroughs and use that to pick stocks or send their agents to wrap up the IP or something.

AuthAuth 1/27/2026||
This does way less than i'd expect. Converting images to tikz is nice but some of the other applications demonstrated were horrible. This is no way anyone should be using AI to cite.
epolanski 1/27/2026||
Not gonna lie, I cringed when it asked to insert citations.

Like, what's the point?

You cite stuff because you literally talk about it in the paper. The expectation is that you read that and that it has influenced your work.

As someone who's been a researcher in the past, with 3 papers published in high impact journals (in chemistry), I'm beyond appalled.

Let me explain how scientific publishing works to people out of the loop:

- science is an insanely huge domain. Basically as soon as you drift in any topic the number of reviewers with the capability to understand what you're talking about drops quickly to near zero. Want to speak about properties of helicoidal peptides in the context of electricity transmission? Small club. Want to talk about some advanced math involving fourier transforms in the context of ml? Bigger, but still small club. When I mean small, I mean less than a dozen people on the planet likely less with the expertise to properly judge. It doesn't matter what the topic is, at elite level required to really understand what's going on and catch errors or bs, it's very small clubs.

2. The people in those small clubs are already stretched thin. Virtually all of them run labs so they are already bogged down following their own research, fundraising, and coping with teaching duties (which they generally despise, very few good scientist are barely more than mediocre professors and have already huge backlogs).

3. With AI this is a disaster. If having to review slop for your bs internal tool at your software job was already bad, imagine having to review slop in highly technical scientific papers.

4. The good? People pushing slop, due to these clubs being relatively small, will quickly find their academic opportunities even more limited. So the incentives for proper work are hopefully there. But if asian researchers (yes, no offense), were already spamming half the world papers with cheated slop (non reproducible experiments) in the desperate bid of publishing before, I can't imagine now.

bonsai_spool 1/28/2026||
> But if asian researchers (yes, no offense), were already spamming half the world papers with cheated slop (non reproducible experiments) in the desperate bid of publishing before, I can't imagine now.

Hmm, I follow the argument, but it's inconsistent with your assertion that there is going to be incentive for 'proper work' over time. Anecdotally, I think the median quality of papers from middle- and top-tier Chinese universities is improving (your comment about 'asian researchers' ignores that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have established research programs at least in biology).

SoKamil 1/27/2026||
It’s like not only the technology is to blame, but the culture and incentives of modern world.

The urge to cheat in order to get a job, promotion, approval. The urge to do stuff you are not even interested in, to look good in the resume. And to some extent I feel sorry for these people. At the end of the day you have to pay your bills.

epolanski 1/27/2026||
This isn't about paying your bills, but having a chance of becoming a full time researcher or professor in academia which is obviously the ideal career path for someone interested in science.

All those people can go work for private companies, but few as scientists rather than technicians or QAs.

uwehn 1/28/2026||
If you're looking for something like this for typst: any VSCode fork with AI (Cursor, Antigravity, etc) plus the tinymist extension (https://github.com/Myriad-Dreamin/tinymist) is pretty nice. Since it's local, it won't have the collaboration/sharing parts built in, but that can be solved too in the usual ways.
pwdisswordfishy 1/27/2026||
Oh, like that mass surveillance program!
matteocantiello 1/28/2026||
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.

andrepd 1/27/2026||
"Chatgpt writes scientific papers" is somehow being advertised as a good thing. What is there even left to say?
hulitu 1/27/2026||
> Introducing Prism Accelerating science writing and collaboration with AI.

I thought this was introduced by the NSA some time ago.

webdoodle 1/28/2026|
Lol, yep. Now with enhanced A.I. terrorist tracking...

Fuck A.I. and the collaborators creating it. They've sold out the human race.

drakenot 1/28/2026|
This is handy for maintaining a resume!

I converted my resume to LaTeX with Claude Code recently. Being able to iterate on this code-form of my document is so much nicer than fighting the formatting with in Word/Google Docs.

I dropped my .tex file into Prism and it makes it nice to instantly render it.

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