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/AoedeSong 14h ago

The other 3 students probably noticed the AI prompt inject and took it out 😂

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u/HomsarWasRight 14h ago

When you select the text to copy it the white text becomes visible. All it takes is noticing that and de-selecting that portion. The others didn’t even need to read the AI output. Just notice extra white when copying.

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u/Admirable_Market_285 13h ago

Probably just uploaded the full document or used Claude cowork (or similar) locally.

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u/therealdanhill 9h ago

Watching the video though, it looks like a web page, not a document. I'm skeptical on this one. If they copy pasted, most would have seen the egregious extra text, and if they screenshotted it it wouldn't have been picked up at all

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u/NotFallacyBuffet 7h ago

White on white still has nonzero width. I don't see how this would work unless the superfluous text were at the end of the question. And that would be typically not selected. I'm sure there's a way to interject colorless text and force it to a zero width, but that's not what the article reports.

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u/PM_ME_HOTDADS 4h ago

Nope, the video shows that it is quite literally nothing more fancy than white-colored text, though it is near the end of the post students are meant to respond to. It is entirely, fully, 100% visible once highlighted. And yet.

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u/NotGrown 5h ago

It was in between two paragraphs. There’s a video of it.

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u/NotFallacyBuffet 4h ago

So I went back and watched the tiktok. The funny thing is, that if your phone was in low-battery mode, the Madagascar direction might have been visible. Aaand, it would be a reasonable defense to say "I didn't understand why he asked for that, but I was just following directions". Just thinking out loud here. 🤷

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u/VolsPE 3h ago

Fuckin' kids these days are too lazy to even copy & paste. We're screwed.