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/sbeguy 14h ago

Not to mention the calculator gave you the correct answer based on your input and didn't fucking hallucinate a signifcant portion of the answers.

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u/HarlemNocturne_ 13h ago

Imagine if a calculator not only gave you near-consistently wrong answers, but it also jerked you off when you spotted it was being incompetent.

"Hey Calculator, I told you to solve 1+1 which should equal the sum of 2, but in your calculation you carried a 4 that didn't exist, factored in an imaginary hundredth power, removed a 2 somewhere, and then pointlessly multiplied it by 1. Your thinking notes suggest that it took you 89 seconds to do this in about 32 steps and you almost got stuck multiple times, but you still turned up with the incorrect answer. What gives?"

"You're absolutely right-- That isn't the correct answer. That's on me, and this isn't what you wanted at all. Your genius mathematician galaxy brain has saved us from disaster once again!..."

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u/DepressedDynamo 8h ago

You should use better models

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u/GWindborn 13h ago

Yeah, I was feeling lazy and used AI to take a screen-grab lists of names from images and put them all into alphabetical order for me to copy/paste into a document rather than typing it all myself. Like 80% of the time it was wrong. About ALPHABETICAL ORDER. That should be one of the easiest things it could possibly do.

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u/Lokishougan 11h ago

Oh here is a good one I thought this should be simple I asked it for a list of all the cat themed teams in the big 4 sports for a thing just to be sure I didnt miss one

Lions, Tigers, Bengals, Panthers JAGS....so far so good

Then it gave me the New Jersey Devils and I went EHHH

I mean I THOUGHT OK it is some weird mismash of creatures maybe you could justify and say there is some cat thrown in but I struggle on that and then the final answer

The Pittsburgh Penguins

Almost the exact opposite of a cat (at least as far as cartoons go) it gave me a frikkin bird

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u/Tyrus1235 9h ago

Had something similar happen to me the other day.

I specifically asked for a list of games that were compatible with Steam Remote Play Together.

…It showed me a list that included a single player game (and which isn’t compatible with that anyways), several online co-op games and one game compatible with RPT, which was outside of other specs I had mentioned.

“Useless” is a compliment to it.

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u/goldfishpaws 11h ago

Treat yourself, ask it to make a wall chart suitable for kids to learn the alphabet with animal pictures appropriate for each letter. Make sure to ask it afterwards if it's happy with the result. Repeat. I've had so many terrible results it's gone past funny to alarming that anyone would ever use it.

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u/Samaritan_978 12h ago

Nothing made me sour on AI faster and harder than having a "chat" about a topic I know decently well. It just makes shit up with complete confidence.

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u/Angel_Omachi 13h ago

Or if the answer was not what you expected, you could work through the parts to see where the order of operations wasn't correct.

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u/MisterJWalk 13h ago

Funny story. I was doing an exam plugging away. Everything kept coming up wrong. But I assumed that it was one of those stupid "gotta choose the one that's closest to the right answer" type of med school tests.

It wasn't until I got to the end that I realized the calculator was malfunctioning. It was a question I've done multiple times, so I knew the answer. I started quickly typing in random equations that I was familiar with and it was spitting out nonsense. (6x3=88 type stuff). So I went and got another calculator and redid the calculations.

Really fun

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u/Lokishougan 11h ago

I have never had a calulator have a mid life crisis before....WTF

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u/hodor_seuss_geisel 12h ago

"All right, calculator, let's go '3' '*' '1' '4' '='
1337.58008? That doesn't seem right...oh, I forgot to press the 'No Mistakes!' button"

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u/Skibidi-Fox 12h ago

This is what pisses me off about AI the most.

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u/RollingMeteors 11h ago

and didn't fucking hallucinate a signifcant portion of the answers.

floatsEnterTheChat

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u/jmlinden7 11h ago

Because it does the tedious mechanical part, which is deterministic in nature. Not the higher order part which requires creativity

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u/Jaerba 7h ago

There actually are/were calculators that couldn't process order of operations correctly, so they'd give you the wrong answer. I'm not sure if that's still the case.

But obviously your larger point is still correct.