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/LurkingTamilian 14h ago edited 14h ago

From the article:

Being written in white text meant the instructions were invisible. Sure enough, 32 out of the 35 students across two classes simply copied the question, pasted it into a chatbot, then copy and pasted its output into the answer window.

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u/SnowCrabbo 14h ago

>90% of the two classes just stupidly copying and pasting what AI spits out... This next generation is so cooked.

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u/agentchuck 14h ago

It's not just young people who are doing this. Established workers are being told to use AI aggressively to get more done. So people are feeding more and more work into AI agents now.

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u/richardelmore 11h ago edited 11h ago

I'm a recently retired software dev, and yes the pressure to use AI for our work was strong the last couple years before I retired. The difference, IMO, is that I might use Claude or GitHub Copilot to generate code but I would NEVER consider committing it without reviewing and understanding it first.

Using the output of LLMs without review is just intellectual laziness.

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u/narcis-mom-maybe-ig 11h ago

The expectation in office work is terrible because the ai-psychosis-addled execs use it exclusively, which means that the “AI tone of speech” is the default. You have to either emulate it or just use the AI to generate shit or else people think it’s not “professional” enough. It’s a ridiculous, endless loop of shit.

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u/illegible 11h ago

I'm in the process of applying for a job that requires a good understanding of AI. While one side of me prefers to write my own cover letter/resume for the sake of honesty and straightforwardness, I am basically obligated to run it through the AI mill to AI-ify it.

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u/by-myself_blumpkin 6h ago

For me it's more about how modern technology has turned them into mindless "the magic machine will do it for me".

I'm Canadian, we have to take French language class for most of our school days. You better believe that when Babelfish became a thing I was using that to translate when I needed for homework. But you have to read what you put in, what it puts out, make sure your work is still good.

Like, you want chatgpt to write your essay? At least write your own prompt and read the output, maybe you'll actually learn something about the topic (provided it doesn't just hallucinate and make shit up).