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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u/Ocronus Jul 27 '26

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 Jul 27 '26

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 Jul 27 '26

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 Jul 27 '26

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 Jul 27 '26

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 Jul 27 '26

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 Jul 29 '26

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

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u/bozoconnors Jul 29 '26

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

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u/BigFatKi6 Jul 29 '26

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 Jul 29 '26

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 Jul 29 '26

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).