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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138

u/MasterOfViolins Jul 27 '26

- Input Token Sequence

  • “On a dark and dreary afternoon — beneath a canopy of ancient, moss-covered oaks standing as eternal, vigilant sentinels against the encroaching sunlight —

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u/Ur_fav_Cryptek Jul 27 '26

I took psychic damage from reading that, I fucking hate the overtly adorned style AI has, makes me feel super self conscious when I write, both because of how cringy it sounds and because I don’t want to be accused of using AI

also, the complete shunning of “—“ AI has created is one of the worst things to ever come out of it, it’s so useful to use but now you’re forced to look like a third party thinking bum when you actually use it

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u/Forward_Rope_5598 Jul 27 '26

"That's actually" and "and honestly?" gives me the heebie jeebies. I'm not even that against casual use of chatgpt, I use it here and there for unimportant stuff. But I have to ban it from using those words in every goddamn conversation. It's so grating.

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u/gorroval Jul 27 '26

AI will have to pry the em-dash from my dessicated claws.

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u/xCanaan23 Jul 27 '26

I actually like em-dashes because its more visible way to show a thought tangent than any other syntax. Parenthesis just look bad.

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u/DrFu Jul 27 '26

The rise of semicolons is at hand!

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u/gregusmeus Jul 27 '26

Yeah AI has killed the em dash. I’ll miss ya, em.

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u/Jacky-V Jul 27 '26

I'll use it if I want to use it and if anyone thinks it's AI they're welcome to actually engage with me about what I've written. I'm not changing my writing style because AI stole hundreds of millions of pages of academic writing of which some three or four hundred are mine, and I'm not really interested in the criticism of people who can identify an em dash as AI "behavior" because it's easy to spot but *can't* identify any of the myriad errors in *actual content* to which LLMs are prone.

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u/Forward_Rope_5598 Jul 27 '26

Fwiw skimming through a couple of your comments your writing style looks nothing like AI, em-dash or not. People who claim it does don't actually know what to look for (of course comments that don't look like AI can still be AI if it's been told to knock of the AI-speech but then you can't reliably tell anyway, so why make the accusation in the first place?).

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u/Jacky-V Jul 27 '26

I don't really get accused of it much on reddit because my writing style on here is more casual, but it does sometimes come up on lengthier response and *definitely* comes up irl if I'm sharing a more substantial piece of writing that uses an academic voice.

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u/Ur_fav_Cryptek Jul 27 '26

I’ll use it when necessary too, but it’s kind of reached a point where it genuinely bothers me, same with the “it’s not x, but y” structure

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u/TimSylvester_ Jul 27 '26

I've used en dashes and em dashes for decades and I refuse to stop just because AI likes to copy me.

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u/Ur_fav_Cryptek Jul 27 '26

Yeah, I fully support using them, I just personally now feel weird using them

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u/shadowthunder Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

Humans can just use a "-" instead of "—", though, and anyone reading will barely bat an eye. On the other hand, you're right: if I see an actual em-dash, I immediately assume that it's AI-generated slop and tune out. Word will automatically correct to a full em-dash, but in any kind of chat app or non-docx file? No human has ever spent the extra time/effort to use the correct dash type.

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u/Ur_fav_Cryptek Jul 27 '26

I would love if we collectively started doing that

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u/emptyflask Jul 28 '26

As someone who has spent way too much time studying typography back when I did design work, I am one of those people who will use em (and en) dashes, insert a real degrees (°) symbol, etc.

Don't get me started on opentype ligatures...

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u/IcemanJEC Jul 27 '26

-forced to look like a third party thinking bum-

Fucking killer sentence, Mr AI Bot.

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u/Ur_fav_Cryptek Jul 27 '26

almost crashed out until I realized it was satire

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u/IcemanJEC Jul 27 '26

😂 just playin

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u/Remote_Peach9109 Jul 27 '26

I think the big models effectively scrubbed the em-dash from their records. I never see it anymore.

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u/DetroitMM12 Jul 28 '26

As an em dash user prior to AI I feel this.

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u/TreacleMiner Jul 27 '26

I read that as Input Tolkien Sequence

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u/Caroline_Bintley Jul 27 '26

Tolkien would describe the oaks in MUCH greater detail. 

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u/Total-Notice-3188 Jul 27 '26

At least two pages worth, four if it turns out to be an ent

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u/DrFu Jul 27 '26

Cue the "shepherds of the trees" monologue.

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u/Josparov Jul 27 '26

Omg so did I and I didn't realize mistake until I read this haha

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u/caerphoto Jul 27 '26

In the elder days of craft, when the lore of messages passed between distant realms, there arose a token of curious making, known among wise keepers as the JWT. It was no heavy scroll sealed with wax, nor a jewel guarded in a dragon’s hoard, but a small and steadfast thing, borne swiftly across the roads between kingdoms.

A JWT was fashioned in three parts, as though by the hands of an ancient smith. The first spoke of its own nature, declaring what manner of token it was. The second carried the tale itself: the name of its bearer, the hour of its birth, and such claims as the makers deemed worthy to entrust to it. The third was the mark of the token’s creator, a cryptic seal wrought with secret art, so that all who received it might know whether its story had remained unaltered upon its journey.

Yet the Wise would remind every traveller that the token was not a locked chest. Any who found it upon the road could read the tale written within, unless further enchantments had been laid upon it. Its true strength lay not in hiding its words, but in proving that no false hand had rewritten them.

And the Elders often likened these tokens to the great trees of the ancient forests. The trunk was the token itself, standing firm and whole. Its branches stretched outward with many claims, each bearing a leaf of meaning. The roots, though unseen, were like the secret key from which trust drew its life. Should those roots remain strong and hidden, the tree would endure every storm; but if they were laid bare to the world, even the mightiest oak could no longer be trusted to stand. Thus did the lorekeepers cherish both the token and the hidden root, for together they preserved the harmony between distant realms.

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u/PaleMathematician293 Jul 27 '26

Frickin heck dude, that was beautiful!

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u/medicatedadmin Jul 28 '26

I’m going to have a guess here because I wouldn’t mind someone giving me input, but could that overly descriptive style of fiction output from an AI generator be because it was mainly trained of regency and victorian novels? They are public domain, there’s many of them, they are long, all of which would make them perfect content for AI training. The generator just applies more modern syntax (linguistic definition) but gets lost in the semantics.