Comment by ZpJuUuNaQ5

Comment by ZpJuUuNaQ5 4 days ago

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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/

[2] https://prism-pipeline.com/

[3] https://prismppm.com/

[4] https://prismlibrary.com/

[5] https://3dprism.eu/en/

[6] https://www.graphpad.com/features

[7] https://www.prismsoftware.com/

[8] https://prismlive.com/en_us/

[9] https://github.com/Project-Prism/Prism-OS

vladms 4 days ago

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 one check that anyhow. It is not like I was not surprised these years about what some other people think, so who knows... Maybe someone with experience in marketing could explain how it is done.

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  • adammarples 4 days ago

    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.

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    • jackphilson 4 days ago

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

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      • ConceptJunkie 4 days ago

        People? Do you know how many of them are murderers, fraudsters and all around finks. That's a terrible thing to mention.

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    • order-matters 4 days ago

      1 more perspective to add: while i did not know the NSA program was called prism, it did give me pause to find out in this thread. OpenAI surely knows what it was called, at least they should. So it begs the question of why.

      If they claim in a private meeting with people at the NSA that they did it as a tribute to them and a bid for partnership, who would anyone here be to say they didnt? even if they didnt... which is only relevant because OpenAI processes an absolute shitton of data the NSA would be interested in

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bicepjai 4 days ago

When you’re as high profile as OpenAI, you don’t get judged like everyone else. People scrutinize your choices reflexively, and that’s just the tax of being a famous brand: it amplifies both the upsides and the blowback.

Most ordinary users won’t recognize the smaller products you listed, but they will recognize OpenAI and they’ll recognize Snowden/NSA adjacent references because those have seeped into mainstream culture. And even if the average user doesn’t immediately make the connection, someone in their orbit on social media almost certainly will and they’ll happily spin it into a theory for engagement.

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