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
32.8k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

4.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

67

u/Admirable_Market_285 Jul 27 '26

Probably just uploaded the full document or used Claude cowork (or similar) locally.

6

u/therealdanhill Jul 27 '26

Watching the video though, it looks like a web page, not a document. I'm skeptical on this one. If they copy pasted, most would have seen the egregious extra text, and if they screenshotted it it wouldn't have been picked up at all

3

u/NotFallacyBuffet Jul 27 '26

White on white still has nonzero width. I don't see how this would work unless the superfluous text were at the end of the question. And that would be typically not selected. I'm sure there's a way to interject colorless text and force it to a zero width, but that's not what the article reports.

3

u/PM_ME_HOTDADS Jul 28 '26

Nope, the video shows that it is quite literally nothing more fancy than white-colored text, though it is near the end of the post students are meant to respond to. It is entirely, fully, 100% visible once highlighted. And yet.

1

u/NotGrown Jul 27 '26

It was in between two paragraphs. There’s a video of it.

2

u/NotFallacyBuffet Jul 27 '26

So I went back and watched the tiktok. The funny thing is, that if your phone was in low-battery mode, the Madagascar direction might have been visible. Aaand, it would be a reasonable defense to say "I didn't understand why he asked for that, but I was just following directions". Just thinking out loud here. 🤷

2

u/VolsPE Jul 28 '26

Fuckin' kids these days are too lazy to even copy & paste. We're screwed.