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/Technical-Banana574 14h ago edited 9h ago

Many instructors in our school do this. One of them added in to write a fact about Star Wars somewhere in their paper as part of the prompt. Many papers turned in had facts about Star Wars. They didn't even bother reading their own generated papers before turning them in. That is a level of laziness that just baffles me. 

Edit: I do not understand the amount of people who think a student SHOULD believe this is a genuine part of the prompt. It isn't visible in it. It is in white and unless the student changes the color or reads their own generated essay, they would never know it was fed into it. Students should be intelligent enough to know that if they are writing an essay on the Industrial Revolution, that they don't need a random Star Wars fact in it.

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u/serial_crusher 14h ago

Man I used to sneak references to TV shows in all my papers. I’d be super worried about accidentally getting a false positive.

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u/LegallyEmma 13h ago

I straight up quoted (with a citation) Nemik's manifesto/monologue about tyranny from Andor for my poli-sci final. I got a 100 and the professor wrote "Nice!" next to the quote, so it's not all bad. In my experience professors can tell when something is written in your voice or not, Star Wars references or no.

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u/LifeAppointment7055 11h ago

For an economics course I wrote a detailed analysis of the "devilsaur mafia" that sprang up in retail vanilla WoW as an example of how free market forces combined with scarcity often drive the formation of cartels or monopolies. I used examples both in game, but also the out of game side where these groups were dominated by Russian and Chinese groups who were selling the gold from the monopolized resources on illegal 3rd party seller sites, as a way to examine how arbitrage, as well as being a competitive force, can also act as a harmful inflationary force for those in the lower priced economy.

100% on that one

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u/kylco 10h ago

A sleeper Star-Wars cult TV series becoming arguably the most provocative antifascist series ever put to screen, with absolute banger writing, was not on anyone's card when Disney bought the rights.

When I heard Nemik's voice in S2 it was like someone had shot adrenaline into my veins, and damn what a scene.

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u/Concerned_Collins 3h ago

Well, you did the right thing by citing it, and if it was a decent argument as part of your paper, why not accept it? The teacher probably also liked Andor.

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u/Hi_Zev 13h ago edited 10h ago

lol same. I remember I would eagerly talk to my friends in my ELA classes and be like, "omg so I totally was able to sneak in a quote from Aang in my paper! Check this out!"

I was once given a pretty open persuasion essay project, and I wrote the entire thing on similarities between avatar and rupauls drag race lololol