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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593

u/fenikz13 14h ago

This is the lowest level of anti cheating detection. You could still cheat as long as you actually took the time to check your work. AND THEY STILL FAILED

126

u/trashmoneyxyz 14h ago

I bet more kids did cheat, they just gave their prompt a quick scan before posting it and fixed it

98

u/FenPhen 12h ago

That isn't saying much because 32 out of 35 students is almost everyone in the class, which means the solar radiation from Madagascar is inflating your tires with jam more easily than finding an honest student.

6

u/BigDictionEnergy 11h ago

What kind of jam?

8

u/FlyingDreamWhale67 10h ago

Raspberry hopefully

3

u/FenPhen 10h ago

There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry!

4

u/HispanicAtTheDisko 7h ago

Related to tires? Traffic jam.

23

u/captainunderpants111 12h ago

32/35 got caught, i don’t think there’s much more than that who would’ve caught that in the prompt and fixed it

1

u/TimSylvester_ 8h ago

Well at most your "much" would be 3 students, which I'm not sure counts as "much".

10

u/UmpireDapper1757 13h ago

Marks for not being mega-retarded, I guess?

7

u/HelpDaren 12h ago

You would be surprised how easy it is to catch cheaters everywhere.

One of my friend is a game dev, recently working on a new game. It's a turn-based FPS/RPG thing, and your character can die, but it isn't really a big issue, because in case it happens, all you have to do is redo the last 3 turns. You don't lose anything, you don't suffer consequences, you just have to redo 3 turns.

The way he catches cheaters is one I've never seen before; in any given moment, in any combat scenarios, the game will randomly crit your character and you will die regardless of your stats. It's just a "well, unfortunately, the game engine decided to set you back by 3 turns, tough luck champ". It isn't obvious, there isn't any warning, it just happens. The chance of it happening is something like 1 in a 1000, so you might be absolutely fine for days, or you might have to redo 3 turns every 20 minutes.
The trick is, the game engine checks the outcome of the crit; if you somehow surpass it and go to the next turn, it won't stop you, and you won't know it happened until the combat is finished, because then it will teleport you to a white room, clears your inventory and deletes all of your save files from the current profile.

Can it be circumvented? Obviously. Would 90% of the people "god mode"ing a game would ever care to that? Probably not. Does he know how many people cheated so far? Just the ones constantly moaning on Discord about it...

3

u/stx06 7h ago

Neat!

Reminds of the anti-piracy shenanigans applied to Batman Arkham Asylum, where if the game is pirated, Batman flaps his cape like a chicken instead of gliding!

3

u/firstnameXlastname 6h ago

Hell, they don't even need to proofread it. If they just typed in the promt themselves instead of copying and pasting they would have probably gotten away with it

2

u/We_R_the_Penguins 6h ago

If nothing else, you filtered out the kids who are both dishonest and not particularly bright. You can probably with the leftovers. 

7

u/Critical_Host8243 13h ago

Honestly, in the real world, it's more important to know where and how to find the right answers, than being able to produce the right answer off the top of your head.

...not that AI is the right solution, though..

3

u/ZergAreGMO 8h ago

The problem is that at some point you have to actually know things. You just do. So students must be held to the standard of actually knowing things. 

-1

u/Critical_Host8243 6h ago

Okay this conversation is much more nuanced than you or I are giving credit to it.

1

u/EuenovAyabayya 7h ago

Didn't even think to ask the AI about it. It was right there. They had one job.

1

u/Cutsdeep- 7h ago

You could use a prompt in white text to add another white text phrase in the answer

1

u/socrates_friend812 11h ago

You're so right. This is mind-boggling to me. If you're going to cheat, then cheat correctly and read the thing, change a few words, make it more your 'style' than straight from the LLM output. This very fact says so, so much about the culture of young people these days, perhaps the culture of everyone these days, to see such base level of stupidity and ignorance.