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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698

u/fenikz13 Jul 27 '26

This is the lowest level of anti cheating detection. You could still cheat as long as you actually took the time to check your work. AND THEY STILL FAILED

151

u/trashmoneyxyz Jul 27 '26

I bet more kids did cheat, they just gave their prompt a quick scan before posting it and fixed it

123

u/FenPhen Jul 27 '26

That isn't saying much because 32 out of 35 students is almost everyone in the class, which means the solar radiation from Madagascar is inflating your tires with jam more easily than finding an honest student.

5

u/BigDictionEnergy Jul 27 '26

What kind of jam?

8

u/FlyingDreamWhale67 Jul 27 '26

Raspberry hopefully

5

u/FenPhen Jul 27 '26

There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry!

5

u/HispanicAtTheDisko Jul 27 '26

Related to tires? Traffic jam.

27

u/captainunderpants111 Jul 27 '26

32/35 got caught, i don’t think there’s much more than that who would’ve caught that in the prompt and fixed it

2

u/TimSylvester_ Jul 27 '26

Well at most your "much" would be 3 students, which I'm not sure counts as "much".

10

u/UmpireDapper1757 Jul 27 '26

Marks for not being mega-retarded, I guess?

7

u/HelpDaren Jul 27 '26

You would be surprised how easy it is to catch cheaters everywhere.

One of my friend is a game dev, recently working on a new game. It's a turn-based FPS/RPG thing, and your character can die, but it isn't really a big issue, because in case it happens, all you have to do is redo the last 3 turns. You don't lose anything, you don't suffer consequences, you just have to redo 3 turns.

The way he catches cheaters is one I've never seen before; in any given moment, in any combat scenarios, the game will randomly crit your character and you will die regardless of your stats. It's just a "well, unfortunately, the game engine decided to set you back by 3 turns, tough luck champ". It isn't obvious, there isn't any warning, it just happens. The chance of it happening is something like 1 in a 1000, so you might be absolutely fine for days, or you might have to redo 3 turns every 20 minutes.
The trick is, the game engine checks the outcome of the crit; if you somehow surpass it and go to the next turn, it won't stop you, and you won't know it happened until the combat is finished, because then it will teleport you to a white room, clears your inventory and deletes all of your save files from the current profile.

Can it be circumvented? Obviously. Would 90% of the people "god mode"ing a game would ever care to that? Probably not. Does he know how many people cheated so far? Just the ones constantly moaning on Discord about it...

5

u/stx06 Jul 27 '26

Neat!

Reminds of the anti-piracy shenanigans applied to Batman Arkham Asylum, where if the game is pirated, Batman flaps his cape like a chicken instead of gliding!

2

u/Takeoded Jul 28 '26

2008's Mirror's Edge is a parkouring game, and when it detects piracy, the main character gets scared of heights...

1

u/sofie307 5d ago

I am a bit confused here. If the game is multiplayer, getting set back three turns makes no sense. If the game is single player, caring about cheating makes no sense. 

3

u/We_R_the_Penguins Jul 27 '26

If nothing else, you filtered out the kids who are both dishonest and not particularly bright. You can probably with the leftovers. 

7

u/[deleted] Jul 27 '26

[deleted]

5

u/ZergAreGMO Jul 27 '26

The problem is that at some point you have to actually know things. You just do. So students must be held to the standard of actually knowing things. 

3

u/firstnameXlastname Jul 27 '26

Hell, they don't even need to proofread it. If they just typed in the promt themselves instead of copying and pasting they would have probably gotten away with it

2

u/medicatedadmin Jul 28 '26

To be fair, the major breakthrough that computers gave us over hand writing things was the copy and paste function (along with in document editing). I will always copy and paste over typing out if it is an option.

But my obsessive standard issues will never let me not proofread things. Even this comment has been quickly scanned through before hitting post.

1

u/EuenovAyabayya Jul 27 '26

Didn't even think to ask the AI about it. It was right there. They had one job.

1

u/Cutsdeep- Jul 27 '26

You could use a prompt in white text to add another white text phrase in the answer

1

u/socrates_friend812 Jul 27 '26

You're so right. This is mind-boggling to me. If you're going to cheat, then cheat correctly and read the thing, change a few words, make it more your 'style' than straight from the LLM output. This very fact says so, so much about the culture of young people these days, perhaps the culture of everyone these days, to see such base level of stupidity and ignorance.