8 ms·

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 com

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 unprecedented during the life-times of most of us) and talking about digital sovereignty has become mainstream in Europe. As a company trying to promote a product, I would stay as far away from that memory as possible, at least if you care about international markets. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46787165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46787165

JasonADrury 8mo ago
This comment might make more sense if there was some connection or similarity between the OpenAI "Prism" product and the NSA surveillance program. There doesn't appear to be.
- Schlagbohrer 8mo ago
  Except that this lets OpenAI gain research data and scientific ideas by stealing from their users, using their huge mass surveillance platform. So, tremendous overlap.
  - isege 8mo ago
    This comment allows ycombinator to steal ideas from their user's comments, using their huge mass news platform. Temendous overlap indeed.
  - concats 8mo ago
    Isn't most research and scientific data is already shared openly (in publications usually)?
  - cruffle_duffle 8mo ago
    "Except that this lets OpenAI gain research data and scientific ideas by stealing from their users, using their huge mass surveillance platform. So, tremendous overlap." Even if what you say is completely untrue (and who really knows for sure).... it creates that mental association. It's a horrible product name.
pageandrew 8mo ago
These things don't really seem related at all. Its a pretty generic term.
- ImHereToVote 8mo ago
  They are farming scientists for insight.
- vaylian 8mo ago
  And yet, the name immediately reminded me of the Snowden relevations.
- Phelinofist 8mo ago
  FWIW, my immediate reaction was the same "That reminds me of NSA PRISM"
  - karmakurtisaani 8mo ago
    Same here.
    - 3form 8mo ago
      Same, to the point where I was wondering if someone deliberately named it so. But I expect that whoever made this decision simply doesn't know or care.
  - addandsubtract 8mo ago
    It reminded me of the code highlighter[0], and the ORM Prisma[1]. [0] https://prismjs.com/ https://prismjs.com/ [1] https://www.prisma.io/ https://www.prisma.io/
  - wmeredith 8mo ago
    It reminded me of the album cover to Dark Side of The Moon by Pink Floyd.
- kakacik 8mo ago
  I came here based to headline expecting some more cia & nsa shit, that word is tarnished for few decades in better part of IT community (that actually cares about this craft beyond paycheck)
bandrami 8mo ago
I mean it's also the name of the national engineering education journal and a few other things. There's only 14,000 5-letter words in English so you're going to have collisions.
aargh_aargh 8mo ago
I still can't get over the Apple thing. Haven't enjoyed a ripe McIntosh since. </s>
sunaookami 8mo ago
>Has the technical and scientific community in the US already forgotten this huge breach of trust? Have you ever seen the comment section of a Snowden thread here? A lot of users here call for Snowden to be jailed, call him a russian asset, play down the reports etc. These are either NSA sock puppet accounts or they won't bite the hand that feeds them (employees of companies willing to breach their users trust). Edit: see my comment here in a snowden thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46237098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46237098
- TiredOfLife 8mo ago
  Him being (or best case becoming) a russian asset turned out to be true
  - omnimus 8mo ago
    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.
    - jll29 8mo ago
      They both undertook something they believed in, and showed extreme courage. And they did manage to get the word out. They are both relatively free now, but it is true, they both paid a price. Idealism is that you follow your principles despite that price, not escaping/evading the consequences.
    - BlueTemplar 8mo ago
      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.)
      - Matl 8mo ago
        So exposing corruption of Western governments is not worthwhile because it 'helps' Russia? Aha, got it. 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.
alfiedotwtf 8mo ago
> Has the technical and scientific community in the US already forgotten this huge breach of trust? We haven’t forgotten… it’s mostly that we’re all jaded given the fact that there has been zero ramifications and so what’s the use of complaining - you’re better off pushing shit up a hill
aa-jv 8mo ago
>Has the technical and scientific community in the US already forgotten this huge breach of trust? Yes, imho, there is a great deal of ignorance of the actual contents of the NSA leaks. The agitprop against Snowden as a "Russian agent" has successfully occluded the actual scandal, which is that the NSA has built a totalitarian-authoritarian apparatus that is still in wide use. Autocrats' general hubris about their own superiority has been weaponized against them. Instead of actually addressing the issue with America's repressive military industrial complex, they kill the messenger.
saidnooneever 8mo ago
tons of things are called prism. (full disclosure, yes they will be handin in PII on demands like the same kinda deals, this is 'normal' - 2012 shows us no one gives a shit)
ZpJuUuNaQ5 8mo ago
>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 better if they named it "Polyhedron"?
- jll29 8mo ago
  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 that city's name evokes images of piles of corpses of gassed undernourished human beings, walls of gas chambers with fingernail scratches and lamp shades made of human skin.
  - 946789987649 8mo ago
    Do a lot of people know that Prism is the name of the program? I certainly didn't and consider myself fairly switched on in general
    - BlueTemplar 8mo ago
      It's likely to be an age thing too. Were you in hacker-related spaces when the Snowden scandal happened ? (I expect a much higher than average share of people in academia also part of these spaces.)
  - ZpJuUuNaQ5 8mo ago
    Well, I don't know anything about marketing and you might have a point, but the severity of impact of these two words is clearly very different, so it doesn't look like a good comparison to me. It would raise quite a few eyebrows and more if, for example, someone released a Linux distro named "Auschwitz OS", meanwhile, even in the software world, there are multiple products that incorporate the word prism in various ways[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. I don't believe that an average user encountering the word "prism" immediately starts thinking about NSA surveillance program. [1] https://www.prisma.io/ https://www.prisma.io/ [2] https://prism-pipeline.com/ https://prism-pipeline.com/ [3] https://prismppm.com/ https://prismppm.com/ [4] https://prismlibrary.com/ https://prismlibrary.com/ [5] https://3dprism.eu/en/ https://3dprism.eu/en/ [6] https://www.graphpad.com/features https://www.graphpad.com/features [7] https://www.prismsoftware.com/ https://www.prismsoftware.com/ [8] https://prismlive.com/en_us/ https://prismlive.com/en_us/ [9] https://github.com/Project-Prism/Prism-OS https://github.com/Project-Prism/Prism-OS
chromanoid 8mo ago
Sorry, did you read this https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2018/12/14/SJWJS.html https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2018/12/14/SJWJS.html? I personally associate Prism with [Silverlight - Composite Web Apps With Prism](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2009/july/composing-applications-with-silverlight-and-prism https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2009...) due to personal reasons I don't want to talk about ;))
alexpadula 8mo ago
That’s funny af
yayitswei 8mo ago
Fwiw I was going to make the same comment about the naming, but you beat me to it.
lrvick 8mo ago
Considering OpenAI is deeply rooted in anti-freedom ethos and surveillance capitalism, I think it is quite a self aware and fitting name.
WiSaGaN 8mo ago
OpenAI has a former NSA director on its board. [1] This connection makes the dilution of the term "PRISM" in search results a potential benefit to NSA interests. [1]: https://openai.com/index/openai-appoints-retired-us-army-general/ https://openai.com/index/openai-appoints-retired-us-army-gen...
CalRobert 8mo ago
Do they care what anyone over 30 thinks?
igleria 8mo ago
money is a powerful amnesiac
wmeredith 8mo ago
I get what you're saying, but that was 13 years ago. How long before the branding statute of limitations runs out on usage for a simple noun?
LordDragonfang 8mo ago
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.
johanyc 8mo ago
I did not make the association at all
observationist 8mo ago
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.
teddyh 8mo ago
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.
cruffle_duffle 8mo ago
As a datapoint, when I read this headline, the very first thing i thought of as "wasn't PRISM some NSA shit? Is OpenAI working with the NSA now?" It's a horrible name for any product coming out of a company like OpenAI. People are super sensitive to privacy and government snooping and OpenAI is a ripe target for that sort of thinking. It's a pretty bad association. You do not want your AI company to be in any way associated with government surveillance programs no matter how old they are.
hcfman 8mo ago
Yeah, to be fair I would be hesitant to have anything to do with any program called prism as well. Hard to imagine that no one brought this up when they were thinking of a name.

JasonADrury 8mo ago

This comment might make more sense if there was some connection or similarity between the OpenAI "Prism" product and the NSA surveillance program. There doesn't appear to be.

Schlagbohrer 8mo ago
Except that this lets OpenAI gain research data and scientific ideas by stealing from their users, using their huge mass surveillance platform. So, tremendous overlap.
- isege 8mo ago
  This comment allows ycombinator to steal ideas from their user's comments, using their huge mass news platform. Temendous overlap indeed.
- concats 8mo ago
  Isn't most research and scientific data is already shared openly (in publications usually)?
- cruffle_duffle 8mo ago
  "Except that this lets OpenAI gain research data and scientific ideas by stealing from their users, using their huge mass surveillance platform. So, tremendous overlap." Even if what you say is completely untrue (and who really knows for sure).... it creates that mental association. It's a horrible product name.

pageandrew 8mo ago

These things don't really seem related at all. Its a pretty generic term.

ImHereToVote 8mo ago
They are farming scientists for insight.
vaylian 8mo ago
And yet, the name immediately reminded me of the Snowden relevations.
Phelinofist 8mo ago
FWIW, my immediate reaction was the same "That reminds me of NSA PRISM"
- karmakurtisaani 8mo ago
  Same here.
  - 3form 8mo ago
    Same, to the point where I was wondering if someone deliberately named it so. But I expect that whoever made this decision simply doesn't know or care.
- addandsubtract 8mo ago
  It reminded me of the code highlighter[0], and the ORM Prisma[1]. [0] https://prismjs.com/ https://prismjs.com/ [1] https://www.prisma.io/ https://www.prisma.io/
- wmeredith 8mo ago
  It reminded me of the album cover to Dark Side of The Moon by Pink Floyd.
kakacik 8mo ago
I came here based to headline expecting some more cia & nsa shit, that word is tarnished for few decades in better part of IT community (that actually cares about this craft beyond paycheck)

bandrami 8mo ago

I mean it's also the name of the national engineering education journal and a few other things. There's only 14,000 5-letter words in English so you're going to have collisions.

aargh_aargh 8mo ago

I still can't get over the Apple thing. Haven't enjoyed a ripe McIntosh since. </s>

sunaookami 8mo ago

>Has the technical and scientific community in the US already forgotten this huge breach of trust? Have you ever seen the comment section of a Snowden thread here? A lot of users here call for Snowden to be jailed, call him a russian asset, play down the reports etc. These are either NSA sock puppet accounts or they won't bite the hand that feeds them (employees of companies willing to breach their users trust). Edit: see my comment here in a snowden thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46237098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46237098

TiredOfLife 8mo ago
Him being (or best case becoming) a russian asset turned out to be true
- omnimus 8mo ago
  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.
  - jll29 8mo ago
    They both undertook something they believed in, and showed extreme courage. And they did manage to get the word out. They are both relatively free now, but it is true, they both paid a price. Idealism is that you follow your principles despite that price, not escaping/evading the consequences.
  - BlueTemplar 8mo ago
    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.)
    - Matl 8mo ago
      So exposing corruption of Western governments is not worthwhile because it 'helps' Russia? Aha, got it. 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.

alfiedotwtf 8mo ago

> Has the technical and scientific community in the US already forgotten this huge breach of trust? We haven’t forgotten… it’s mostly that we’re all jaded given the fact that there has been zero ramifications and so what’s the use of complaining - you’re better off pushing shit up a hill

aa-jv 8mo ago

>Has the technical and scientific community in the US already forgotten this huge breach of trust? Yes, imho, there is a great deal of ignorance of the actual contents of the NSA leaks. The agitprop against Snowden as a "Russian agent" has successfully occluded the actual scandal, which is that the NSA has built a totalitarian-authoritarian apparatus that is still in wide use. Autocrats' general hubris about their own superiority has been weaponized against them. Instead of actually addressing the issue with America's repressive military industrial complex, they kill the messenger.

saidnooneever 8mo ago

tons of things are called prism. (full disclosure, yes they will be handin in PII on demands like the same kinda deals, this is 'normal' - 2012 shows us no one gives a shit)

ZpJuUuNaQ5 8mo ago

>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 better if they named it "Polyhedron"?

jll29 8mo ago
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 that city's name evokes images of piles of corpses of gassed undernourished human beings, walls of gas chambers with fingernail scratches and lamp shades made of human skin.
- 946789987649 8mo ago
  Do a lot of people know that Prism is the name of the program? I certainly didn't and consider myself fairly switched on in general
  - BlueTemplar 8mo ago
    It's likely to be an age thing too. Were you in hacker-related spaces when the Snowden scandal happened ? (I expect a much higher than average share of people in academia also part of these spaces.)
- ZpJuUuNaQ5 8mo ago
  Well, I don't know anything about marketing and you might have a point, but the severity of impact of these two words is clearly very different, so it doesn't look like a good comparison to me. It would raise quite a few eyebrows and more if, for example, someone released a Linux distro named "Auschwitz OS", meanwhile, even in the software world, there are multiple products that incorporate the word prism in various ways[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. I don't believe that an average user encountering the word "prism" immediately starts thinking about NSA surveillance program. [1] https://www.prisma.io/ https://www.prisma.io/ [2] https://prism-pipeline.com/ https://prism-pipeline.com/ [3] https://prismppm.com/ https://prismppm.com/ [4] https://prismlibrary.com/ https://prismlibrary.com/ [5] https://3dprism.eu/en/ https://3dprism.eu/en/ [6] https://www.graphpad.com/features https://www.graphpad.com/features [7] https://www.prismsoftware.com/ https://www.prismsoftware.com/ [8] https://prismlive.com/en_us/ https://prismlive.com/en_us/ [9] https://github.com/Project-Prism/Prism-OS https://github.com/Project-Prism/Prism-OS

chromanoid 8mo ago

Sorry, did you read this https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2018/12/14/SJWJS.html https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2018/12/14/SJWJS.html? I personally associate Prism with [Silverlight - Composite Web Apps With Prism](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2009/july/composing-applications-with-silverlight-and-prism https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2009...) due to personal reasons I don't want to talk about ;))

alexpadula 8mo ago

That’s funny af

yayitswei 8mo ago

Fwiw I was going to make the same comment about the naming, but you beat me to it.

lrvick 8mo ago

Considering OpenAI is deeply rooted in anti-freedom ethos and surveillance capitalism, I think it is quite a self aware and fitting name.

WiSaGaN 8mo ago

OpenAI has a former NSA director on its board. [1] This connection makes the dilution of the term "PRISM" in search results a potential benefit to NSA interests. [1]: https://openai.com/index/openai-appoints-retired-us-army-general/ https://openai.com/index/openai-appoints-retired-us-army-gen...

CalRobert 8mo ago

Do they care what anyone over 30 thinks?

igleria 8mo ago

money is a powerful amnesiac

wmeredith 8mo ago

I get what you're saying, but that was 13 years ago. How long before the branding statute of limitations runs out on usage for a simple noun?

LordDragonfang 8mo ago

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.

johanyc 8mo ago

I did not make the association at all

observationist 8mo ago

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.

teddyh 8mo ago

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.

cruffle_duffle 8mo ago

As a datapoint, when I read this headline, the very first thing i thought of as "wasn't PRISM some NSA shit? Is OpenAI working with the NSA now?" It's a horrible name for any product coming out of a company like OpenAI. People are super sensitive to privacy and government snooping and OpenAI is a ripe target for that sort of thinking. It's a pretty bad association. You do not want your AI company to be in any way associated with government surveillance programs no matter how old they are.

hcfman 8mo ago

Yeah, to be fair I would be hesitant to have anything to do with any program called prism as well. Hard to imagine that no one brought this up when they were thinking of a name.