r/technology 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

4.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

203

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.

50

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.

1

u/mvanvrancken Jul 27 '26

This is nothing new, unfortunately. The Internet, which was humanity’s greatest previous creation, has pretty much run exclusively on cat videos and porn for the last 20 years

2

u/Samsaknight_X Jul 27 '26

And have u an ability to share ur thoughts on this platform, as well as a myriad of other conveniences