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Comment by Perseids | Hacker News Reader

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

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>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"?

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

And of course The prism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prism_(optics)

I remember the NSA Prism program, but hearing prism today I would think first of Newton, optics, and rainbows.

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.

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

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.)

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

There was a TV show called "The Mighty Isis" in the 70s. What were they thinking?! (Well, with Joanna Cameron around, I wouldn't be able to think too clearly either.)

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

I think point is that on the sliding scale of words that are no longer allowed to use, "Prism" does not reach the level of "Auschwitz".

Most people don't even remember Snowden at this point.

I have to say I had the same reaction. Sure, "prism" shows up in many contexts. But here it shows up in the context of a company and product that is already constantly in the news for its lackluster regard for other people's expectation of privacy, copyright, and generally trying to "collect it all" as it were, and that, as GP mentioned, in an international context that doesn't put these efforts in the best light.

They're of course free to choose this name. I'm just also surprised they would do so.

Plus there are lots of “legacy” products with the name prism in them. I also don’t think the public makes the connection. It’s mainly people who care to be aware of government overreach who think it’s a bad word association.

But the contexts are closely related.

Large scale technology projects that people are suspicious and anxious about. There are a lot of people anxious that AI will be used for mass surveillance by governments. So you pick a name of another project that was used for mass surveillance by government.

Sure. Like Goebbels. Because they gobble things up.

Altso, nazism. But different context, years ago, so whatever I guess?

Hell, let's just call it Hitler. Different context!

Given what they do it is an insidious name. Words matter.

Comparing words with unique widespread notoriety with a simple, everyday one. Try again.

Prism in tech is very well-known to be a surveillance program.

Coming from a company involved with sharing data to intelligence services (it's the law you can't escape it) this is not wise at all. Unless nobody in OpenAI heard of it.

It was one of the biggest scandal in tech 10 years ago.

They could call it "Workspace". More clear, more useful, no need to use a code-word, that would have been fine for internal use.

So you have to resort to the most extreme examples in order to make it a problem? Do you also think of Hitler when you encounter a word "vegetarian"?

Is that what you think hitler was very famous for?

The extreme examples are an analogy that highlight the shape of the comparison with a more generally loathed / less niche example.

OpenAI is a thing with lots and lots of personal data that the consumers trust OpenAI not to abuse or lose. They chose a product name that matches a us government program that secretly and illegal breached exactly that kind of trust.

Hitler vegetarians isn't a great analogy because vegetarianism isn't related to what made hitler bad. Something closer might be Exxon or BP making a hairgel called "Oilspill" or Dupont making a nail polish called "Forever Chem".

They could have chosen anything but they chose one specifically matching a recent data stealing and abuse scandal.

huh.. seems like a head-scratcher why it would relevant to this argument to select objectionable words instead of benign, inert words.

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.

>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

What Snowden did was heroic. What was shameful was the world's underwhelming reaction. Where were all these images in the media of protest marches like against the Vietnam war?

Someone once said "Religion is opium for the people." - today, give people a mobile device and some doom-scrolling social media celebrity nonsense app, and they wouldn't noticed if their own children didn't come home from school.

Looking back I think allowing more centralized control to various forms of media to private parties did much worse overall than government surveillance on the long run.

For me the problem was not surveillance, the problem is addiction focused app building (+ the monopoly), and that never seem to be a secret. Only now there are some attempts to do something (like Australia and France banning children - which am not sure is feasible or efficient but at least is more than zero).

Remember when people and tech companies protested against SOPA and PIPA? Remember the SOPA blackout day? Today even worse laws are passed with cheers from the HN crowd such as the OSA. Embarassing.

Protests in 2025 alone have outnumbered that of those during the Vietnam War.

Protesting is a poor proxy for American political engagement.

Child neglect and missing children rates are lower than they were 50 years ago.

Are you asserting that disagrees with you is either a propaganda campaign or a cynical insider? Nobody who opposes you has a truly held belief?

So you hate waffles?

Him being (or best case becoming) a russian asset turned out to be true

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.

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.

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.)

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.

No, exposing Western corruption is all well and good, but the problem is that at some point Assange seems to have decided "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", which was a very bad idea when applied to Putin's Russia.

> Assange seems to have decided "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", which was a very bad idea when applied to Putin's Russia

What if he simply decided that the information he obtained is worth having out there no matter the source? It seems to me that you're simply upset that he dared to do so and are trying very hard to come up with a rationalization for why he's a Bad Guy(tm) for daring to turn the tables. It's a transparent and rather lackluster attempt to shift the conversation from what to who.

No, I'm upset that he took money from the Kremlin and hosted a show on Russia Today. (At least it was before 2014 I guess...)

One can only hope that you're at least as upset at the double tapping criminals he exposed.

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.

If the messenger has anything to do with Russia, even after the fact, we should dismiss the message and remember to never look up.

Truth is truth, no matter the source.

Whole Truth is truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie#:~:text=citation%20needed%...

There is also the truth that you say, and the truth that you feel

In what way did it "turn out to be true"? Because he has russian citizenship and is living in a country that is not allied with his home country that is/was actively trying to kill him (and revoked his US passport)?

He could have been a Chinese asset, but CCP is a coward.

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

FWIW, my immediate reaction was the same "That reminds me of NSA PRISM"

It reminded me of the code highlighter[0], and the ORM Prisma[1].

[0] https://prismjs.com/

[1] https://www.prisma.io/

It reminded me of the album cover to Dark Side of The Moon by Pink Floyd.

Same here.

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.

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)

And yet, the name immediately reminded me of the Snowden relevations.

They are farming scientists for insight.

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.

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.

Isn't most research and scientific data is already shared openly (in publications usually)?

"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.

This comment allows ycombinator to steal ideas from their user's comments, using their huge mass news platform. Temendous overlap indeed.

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-gen...

>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.

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.

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)

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

Do they care what anyone over 30 thinks?

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

Sorry, did you read this 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...) due to personal reasons I don't want to talk about ;))

I did not make the association at all

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.

money is a powerful amnesiac

That’s funny af

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

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