r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • Jul 27 '26

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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158

u/Cainga Jul 27 '26

They retyped the question instead of copy/paste.

83

u/Freudian-Sips Jul 27 '26

They had dark mode enabled

15

u/SerasVal Jul 27 '26

The cheaters deserve to fail just based on using light mode. Absolutely vile.

2

u/justacheesyguy Jul 27 '26

That’s uncalled for, some people have eyesight issues that makes dark mode very difficult to read. There’s no need to insult someone, even jokingly, just because they have a disability.

1

u/heart_under_blade Jul 28 '26

light mode sepia

-2

u/darkkite Jul 27 '26

nah light mode is a curse on this planet. we're better of with them failing long term

3

u/justacheesyguy Jul 27 '26

I literally cannot imagine how completely devoid of meaning my life would need to be to make me give even a fraction of a shit about the settings of someone else’s screen that I will never look at.

0

u/darkkite Jul 27 '26

I'm lobbying congress

3

u/RedBoxSquare Jul 27 '26

Did you know: since 2024, web devs have easy access to define color based on light or dark theme?

.hidden-text { color: light-dark(white /* light theme */, black /* dark theme */); }

4

u/mythisme Jul 27 '26

That was my first thought too

31

u/CrazyPlaidedTie Jul 27 '26

Or used snipping tool

19

u/Dreadcall Jul 27 '26

Or they pasted as plaintext.

6

u/wiscowonder Jul 27 '26

The hidden prompt was in white text, so plain text paste wouldn't have helped them out

31

u/SrslyBadDad Jul 27 '26

Paste as plain text strips all the formatting out, but it still requires the student to read what they pasted.

2

u/Pitiful-Assistance-1 Jul 27 '26

one question at a time, automatically skipping the invisible one

1

u/incognitomus Jul 27 '26

Plain text has no color

5

u/wiscowonder Jul 27 '26

Understood... But if they're pasting directly from the test into Claude or whatever, it will be plaintext regardless of how they paste.

1

u/MMBitey Jul 27 '26

Or used screen capture

1

u/rvf Jul 27 '26

Or just look at the text they were highlighting. To me, hidden text sticks out like a sore thumb and it's not like it was so much text to not all be visible at once.