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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.)

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.