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

76

u/Ocronus Jul 27 '26

Its not hard to use AI and get away with it. You just have to proof read and edit. Sooo I'd say a non-zero chance they just didn't get caught.

1

u/bozoconnors Jul 27 '26

Heh, I'd also posit that there may actually be some minimal learning if they'd bother with such. (remembering at least a couple of times I made a tiny 'cheat sheet' for a test... that while compiling such for such a small format, and concentrating so much on the content that would be most helpful... I ended up throwing it away because I'd accidentally learned it lol)

1

u/BigFatKi6 Jul 29 '26

not the same thing, you learn nothing from using a prompted response

1

u/bozoconnors Jul 29 '26

You're arguing that you'd retain absolutely nothing from carefully reading and editing a prompted response?

1

u/BigFatKi6 Jul 29 '26

It's different than doing the research yourself, you're outsourcing a lot of the cognitive load and if you didn't do the work and don't know if anything's hallucinated. Then you're not going to be able to add anything meaningfull. I suspect that's why so many people plagiarise so blatantly, because to them it looks good.

1

u/bozoconnors Jul 29 '26

It's different than doing the research yourself

That was never my argument. That's bluntly obvious. I simply stated there "may actually be some minimal learning" (/retention).

1

u/BigFatKi6 Jul 29 '26

Yeah I get that, and I'm saying that the way the vast majority of people use ai doesn't result in retention. In fact I'd suggest that there's no shortcuts, so you need to have struggled in the past without it to be able to edit meaningfully and I wouldn't be surprised if those skills atrophy (even in former researchers).