OpenAI's Prism — Collaborative Academic Writing with AI

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At least for the maths and the physical sciences, LaTeX is still often the preferred choice for academic content. There are human collaborative LaTeX online editors like Overleaf in this space, and OpenAI has built a free alternative to that with deep integration of AI, all for free:

https://openai.com/prism/

The interface is pretty standard, LaTeX markup on the left, preview on the right. Tools will allow you to create figures, polish text, find references (and push them to Zotero) within the specific context of your written paragraph etc. And while you can do this just copy-pasting from a separate AI app, the lack of context and more klunky workflow makes that far less efficient in guiding the AI. There is even an agent mode so agents can do background tasks on e.g. your discussion while you work on the methods for example.

This was definitely built by math/physics majors. I wish they had built this on Quarto rather than LaTeX directly, as this would expand the number of scientists who could make use of this; as at least in medicine, biology and psychology, LaTeX is rare and recommendations are to use DOCX…

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This is cool, and I agree with you on Quarto (I have the CLI tool installed and have no use for it yet!). Here’s to hoping we get new options.

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I think AI does have a place as an “assistant” in academic creation. In domains where I am an expert, AI sometimes really amazes me, and sometimes fails catastrophically (at a rate far too frequent to trust it for anything independent). Thus using AI as an augmentation (as Prism does) to human creative output rather than a replacement seems the best current approach. For my collaborators who do use LaTeX, this seems like a step up from Overleaf…

Some of the examples where you can sketch a figure and let GPT top-copy are genuine time savers. But I am skeptical it can handle more complex figures generated from data. I think things like generating complex tables or clear structural changes will also benefit from an AI touch.

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@nontroppo I’d personally love to see a tool like this using Pandoc/Markdown or even Typst (for humanities/non-technical things). You write, and the AI formats.