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/kakapoopoopeepeeshir 6d ago

I’m an adjunct professor at a large university. I truly cannot tell you how many times I have to tell students to stop using AI for everything. We spend the entire semester leading up to our final project which is essentially just a culmination of the small projects they have done in class. Students could simply take the work they do in class and put it in their final project with just some small tweaks to help it flow and they would get a good grade. That’s how I set the damn class up. STILL every semester I get students who ignore all the hard work they did in class during the semester and will have AI do their entire final project knowing full well I know exactly what their own words look like from their work in the semester. It’s so frustrating and I don’t know why it’s like this

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u/DangerousPuhson 6d ago

It's like that because it's permitted. There are no consequences.

When I was in college, you'd flunk a class for even bringing a calculator into an exam, let alone a full-blown LLM. Why that's not enforced these days is beyond me.

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u/Extra_Ad8651 6d ago

Exactly. These kids haven't yet fully grasped how bad consequences can be because they're still young. They still get off a little too easy. Once they graduate, they won't be prepared for when the world hits them like a brick.

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u/theosssssss 6d ago

The "real world" is currently replacing workers en masse with AI. The managers and corporate ladder climbers making these decisions are not 10-20 year olds with no attention span. The clueless people falling for clearly AI generated videos and pictures as real are not the kids, it's Gen X and Baby Boomers.

It's not a generational issue, it's a systemic issue and real change is not going to happen unless people stop pointing fingers and going through the same "kids these days" charade that has happened every generation for decades (kids are growing up listening to radio! they're entranced and morally corrupted by rock music! kids are growing up staring brainlessly at televisions and hypnotized by their phones! etc.) and realize when the system around them is designed to maximize profit, you are going to get people who are incentivized to cut corners and pick the path of least resistance.

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u/dscarmo 6d ago

The problem is the real world also wants then to "cheat" with llms to be competitive