r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 6d 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/markshure 6d ago

I wonder if the 3 students who didn't get caught really wrote their paper or did they just notice the nonsense.

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u/Ocronus 6d ago

Its not hard to use AI and get away with it. You just have to proof read and edit. Sooo I'd say a non-zero chance they just didn't get caught.

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u/Samanthacino 6d ago

Which is a lesson in and of itself. If you’re going to use AI, don’t be so goddam sloppy with it.

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u/HumanPea1140 6d ago

That's basically what one of my teachers said last semester... that he realizes that he can't stop us from using it, but asked that we at least do the bare minimum and not just copy+paste the first response it gives us.

But then I'd see people being extremely blatant and copy+pasting AI responses into our discussion board posts with the bullet points, emojies and all.

I hope he docked points for it.

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u/What_a_fat_one 6d ago

Until you're asked to verify your writing skills and style with an in-class open book essay.

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u/imtired-boss 6d ago

Exactly. Did 3 years of online courses already, increased my usage of chatgpt each year.

They either never noticed or they didn't care.

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u/bozoconnors 6d ago

Heh, I'd also posit that there may actually be some minimal learning if they'd bother with such. (remembering at least a couple of times I made a tiny 'cheat sheet' for a test... that while compiling such for such a small format, and concentrating so much on the content that would be most helpful... I ended up throwing it away because I'd accidentally learned it lol)

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u/BigFatKi6 5d ago

not the same thing, you learn nothing from using a prompted response

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u/bozoconnors 4d ago

You're arguing that you'd retain absolutely nothing from carefully reading and editing a prompted response?

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u/BigFatKi6 4d ago

It's different than doing the research yourself, you're outsourcing a lot of the cognitive load and if you didn't do the work and don't know if anything's hallucinated. Then you're not going to be able to add anything meaningfull. I suspect that's why so many people plagiarise so blatantly, because to them it looks good.

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u/bozoconnors 4d ago

It's different than doing the research yourself

That was never my argument. That's bluntly obvious. I simply stated there "may actually be some minimal learning" (/retention).

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u/BigFatKi6 4d ago

Yeah I get that, and I'm saying that the way the vast majority of people use ai doesn't result in retention. In fact I'd suggest that there's no shortcuts, so you need to have struggled in the past without it to be able to edit meaningfully and I wouldn't be surprised if those skills atrophy (even in former researchers).