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Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

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Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#21

Post by bluGill »

rabid_0wl wrote: post #5

I think there is a vast difference between leveraging a tool and outsourcing your cognitive functions, which is what seemed to happen in this specific case. Are schools failing students? How do you instill a desire to learn? I hope someone smart is trying to solve this because the ramifications on society are bleak. One anecdotal case isn't proof but it follows general trends I've seen across campuses.

That has never been an easy question. Learning is hard work. If your parents/school didn't force you to learn it as a kid, then odds are your attempts to learn something new as an adult fail. Many adults take up a musical instrument, or foreign language -only a few learn more than the most basic phrases, these are the most common things for adults to attempt and the track record is poor. Sure adults who know C++ (a tiny subset of adults) might learn Rust with high success - but the hard part is learning to program not the syntax of the language.

A desire to learn generally only gets you to a superficial level before you get bored and realize there is a lot of hard work before you could get a useful level of knowledge. Getting deep requires years of focused effort and that almost always means forced effort. The few adults who learn a musical instrument or foreign language prove the point.

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#22

Post by bigmattystyles »

NDlurker wrote: post #7
kylenessen wrote: post #2

The trap was hidden text instructing the AI to use the word “Madagascar” in a nonsensical way. The assignment was about the Industrial Revolution. “Madagascar wore a toaster to the basketball game” is an example of what a student turned in. The instructor says it was the midterm, but looks like it was more of an online discussion. Anyway, I knew cheating was bad, but this is just flagrant.

I couldn't imagine cheating like that and then not even checking/editing the output.

Don't look at how people submit code in industry then.

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#24

Post by vouaobrasil »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #3
kylenessen wrote: post #2

The trap was hidden text instructing the AI to use the word “Madagascar” in a nonsensical way. The assignment was about the Industrial Revolution. “Madagascar wore a toaster to the basketball game” is an example of what a student turned in. The instructor says it was the midterm, but looks like it was more of an online discussion. Anyway, I knew cheating was bad, but this is just flagrant.

It always amazes me that people don’t even check the output of the AI. I am at the moment going through a codebase where the dev told me that he had AI write the tests and that the project is finished. Turns out that some tests are totally nonsensical and a lot of the real world edge conditions aren’t tested at all. I am all for AI but you can’t just blindly let it do its thing and think you are fine.

It's human nature to use a probabilistic strategy of cheating until one cheat works. We will never eradicate that, and the careful person that checks the output of AI will always be a minority.

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#25

Post by hatthew »

Every few weeks I see a headline about a teacher catching 80%+ of their students cheating with AI. I wonder how much newsworthiness selection bias is taking place here? Out of all teachers that do this type of experiment, do 90% of them them find that most students cheat, or do we just hear about the 1% that have the biggest numbers?

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#26

Post by bluGill »

onion2k wrote: post #13
rabid_0wl wrote: post #5

I think there is a vast difference between leveraging a tool and outsourcing your cognitive functions, which is what seemed to happen in this specific case. Are schools failing students? How do you instill a desire to learn? I hope someone smart is trying to solve this because the ramifications on society are bleak. One anecdotal case isn't proof but it follows general trends I've seen across campuses.

The ramifications are bleak if you're destined to become an employee . Students believe that AI can do their work for them, so they shouldn't be surprised if AI gets the job they wanted. On the other hand, these students are proving that AI is as capable as a student (in their eyes at least) which bodes very well for employers. Limitless numbers of cheap workers.

Even when AI can do the work, their value often is that they have understanding of the work and so can correct the AI. Anyone can prompt an AI to vibe code a program, but someone needs to understand the various things that make for quality so that the program can get to an acceptable level without the boss having to spend his time doing that. That is your boss wants someone who can make decisions that the AI will get wrong.

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#27

Post by ColdStream »

Cider9986 wrote: post #16

I would say any AI generated output, from a student who didnt notice Madagascar in their prompt, would have been extremely easy to detect based on basic llmisms anyway. But I suppose it's much easier to just search for "Madagascar". Also, the professor should see the history of the student writing in the document editor. I write everything using AI and nobody has detected it because I know how to remove llmisms and p…

Phrased in a more negative way "I can cheat better because I can hide the cheating". If you are actively hiding those traits it is sort of admitting that you might think this isnt the most ethical thing to do.

To be more positive, you could also just have different taste in what the output has and are adjusting it to that.

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#28

Post by ColdStream »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #22
NDlurker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't imagine cheating like that and then not even checking/editing the output.

Don't look at how people submit code in industry then.

I can very easily see why there is cognitive burnout with LLM code. Now you essentially have to quality check 10x the code and not all of it is going to be producing stuff that is easy to read or ever remotely checked before being submitted.

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#29

Post by vouaobrasil »

kergonath wrote: post #9
cmiles8 wrote: post #4

I fear for this generation of folks that are losing the ability to think. They have a very sad existence ahead.

The ability to think and no attention to detail whatsoever. I mean, proofreading is absolutely necessary, regardless of how the text was written.

The problem is, human beings on average will only go through the work if they are FORCED to go through the work due to a lack of existence of an easy way. Plenty of people who argue for AI don't seem to understand that the difficulty in preventing laziness is proportional to the strength of the automation enabling that laziness, and AI is much stronger than any other type of automation we've seen so far.

It's just too tempting for most and talking all day about how one should check sources is antiquated because that only worked decently when cheating wasn't so easy. Academic ethics and responsibility cannot scale in the age of AI.

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#30

Post by gnull »

Cider9986 wrote: post #16

I would say any AI generated output, from a student who didnt notice Madagascar in their prompt, would have been extremely easy to detect based on basic llmisms anyway. But I suppose it's much easier to just search for "Madagascar". Also, the professor should see the history of the student writing in the document editor. I write everything using AI and nobody has detected it because I know how to remove llmisms and p…

What is a "document editor"? I edit my documents in Kakoune, and send a PDF. Where is that history supposed to be?

About your actual point: can you also make AI actually say things and have something to say, and not just try to imitate someone who is trying to get a point across?

I'm not catching students, I'm reviewing comments in code and documentation written with AI. I even wish it would convince me and try not to notice it, but I can't. I'm pretty sure I'd fail AI generated slop, not for cheating, but for nonsense.

Ps. You didn't write that comment with AI, did you?

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