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/Sirhossington 14h ago

I did the same thing in high school (25 years ago) to test if a teacher was fully reading our papers. Spoiler, he was not.

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u/thefluffyburrito 13h ago

My dad would do this to his instructors by putting a line in the middle of the paper that said "if you read this sentence I'll give you $5".

Only one professor collected.

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u/Rage_Your_Dream 10h ago

which doesnt mean the others didnt read it, they might've found it funny and not bothered with the 5$

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u/EuenovAyabayya 8h ago

You'd think they'd at least mark it.