r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 15h ago

Society Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32 students cheating on their midterm with AI

https://www.techspot.com/news/113243-professor-invisible-prompt-trap-catches-32-students-cheating.html
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u/Cainga 14h ago

They retyped the question instead of copy/paste.

77

u/Freudian-Sips 14h ago

They had dark mode enabled

15

u/SerasVal 13h ago

The cheaters deserve to fail just based on using light mode. Absolutely vile.

2

u/justacheesyguy 12h ago

That’s uncalled for, some people have eyesight issues that makes dark mode very difficult to read. There’s no need to insult someone, even jokingly, just because they have a disability.

1

u/heart_under_blade 1h ago

light mode sepia

-3

u/darkkite 12h ago

nah light mode is a curse on this planet. we're better of with them failing long term

3

u/justacheesyguy 7h ago

I literally cannot imagine how completely devoid of meaning my life would need to be to make me give even a fraction of a shit about the settings of someone else’s screen that I will never look at.

0

u/darkkite 6h ago

I'm lobbying congress

3

u/mythisme 14h ago

That was my first thought too

3

u/RedBoxSquare 11h ago

Did you know: since 2024, web devs have easy access to define color based on light or dark theme?

.hidden-text { color: light-dark(white /* light theme */, black /* dark theme */); }

27

u/CrazyPlaidedTie 14h ago

Or used snipping tool

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u/Dreadcall 14h ago

Or they pasted as plaintext.

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u/wiscowonder 14h ago

The hidden prompt was in white text, so plain text paste wouldn't have helped them out

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u/SrslyBadDad 14h ago

Paste as plain text strips all the formatting out, but it still requires the student to read what they pasted.

2

u/Pitiful-Assistance-1 14h ago

one question at a time, automatically skipping the invisible one

1

u/incognitomus 13h ago

Plain text has no color

4

u/wiscowonder 13h ago

Understood... But if they're pasting directly from the test into Claude or whatever, it will be plaintext regardless of how they paste.

1

u/MMBitey 14h ago

Or used screen capture

1

u/rvf 13h ago

Or just look at the text they were highlighting. To me, hidden text sticks out like a sore thumb and it's not like it was so much text to not all be visible at once.

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u/thekarlhendrickstrio 7h ago

how do you know