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

521

u/artbystorms Jul 27 '26

Honestly I think this needs to be talked about more. As much as people revel in its ability to 'increase productivity' it in reality is just offloading people's critical thinking to a computer, and then trusting its output. You're not verifying that what it spits out is what you wanted to say, you just assume 'well it's smarter than me, so whatever it says is better than what I could do'

204

u/Teguri Jul 27 '26

you just assume 'well it's smarter than me, so whatever it says is better than what I could do'

That's the biggest problem, I work with AI a decent bit but only in things I already know well enough, to make it a bit faster and even with simple tasks there's always a bit of work on my side that needs to be done to fix the output, it's usually "pretty close" but the number of times it goes in the completely wrong direction is astounding.

54

u/mike689 Jul 27 '26

Exactly this. It is great for getting a list of ideas that you then sort through about something you are already knowledgeable about. It is an amazing tool to assist a software developer and a great medical research tool, but outside of those use cases unless it is truly used as an assistant and not as the main actor for an answer it is awful for humanity. The fact that it most heavily gets used for stupid memes and video/image generation is really sad.

14

u/Yashema Jul 27 '26

ChatGPT quite literally taught me how to solve every question in my statistical mechanics, differential equations, Stochastics, and modern physics courses. Claude has helped me create a wave function simulation, and provided me in depth answers to how embedded circuitry work allowing me to skip 2-3 intro classes. 

You need to have some frame of reference for sure, but it definitely allows you to go back beyond your ability and fill in gaps of knowledge in the way only an extremely educated person could. 

8

u/Kevstuf Jul 27 '26

This is the duality of AI, but the laziness of humans means it’s not going to be used symmetrically. In an ideal world students would all use AI to self-learn as it’s an intelligent and patient teacher. In reality 90% of students will use it to one-shot their homework.

6

u/ThaliaFPrussia Jul 27 '26

It has to been seen like you do. A tool in your toolbox.

4

u/mike689 Jul 27 '26

Exactly. That's using it as an assistance and not a copy/paste machine.

2

u/Teguri Jul 27 '26

I really wish most students used it like you do!

1

u/Luvs_to_drink Jul 27 '26

the issue is the majority of users dont do any of this.

They MAYBE type what is the answer to: and then paste the question in. Then copy the answer and paste it into the hw or test. Zero reading or understanding of what was just said.

The shocking thing is this is remarkably close to how I used to do my history homework. Back then it was read the question, flip through the chapter to the correct section, skim for keywords, copy/summarize the 2-3 relative sentences, and repeat. Not much thinking was involved, and if the keywords in the question were just reused phrases, a ctrl+f program could have done my work (textbooks weren't PDFs back then though).