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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

#31

Post by vkou »

ColdStream wrote: post #18
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.

I try to be optimistic but then I talk with friends who are teachers and it is very grim. I'm sure the students will eventually learn the lesson but only after they have failed a lot in future. It really is taking the easy short term gains for hard long term punishments. But look at many parts of the world and you see that it isn't unique. I saw it from some Cooker-anti Vax folks the saying "You future doctor is curr…

The world is quite fine taking long-term Ls for short-term gains. That's the zeitgeist of the 21st century.

The end result of that is a shit society to live in, but overall welfare is not what we optimize for.

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

#32

Post by vouaobrasil »

hatthew wrote: post #25

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?

I've spent a lot of time in academia and the fact is, people will cheat if they can. That's why you have to implement proctoring and oral exams to prevent cheating. Because if cheating is a strategy that gets you a job and money, it will be implemented regardless. People are not ethical on average.

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

#33

Post by vkou »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #20
onion2k wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Students usually don't have adequate experience or judgement to make good employees. AI being good at satisfying a professor doesn't mean AI is good enough to satisfy an employer. So whether it bodes well or not depends upon whether that gap exists or not. It's probably job specific.

The quality standard expected for most work is even lower than what's expected in school.

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

#34

Post by icedchai »

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.

This happens all the time. I looked at a PR, many tests were broken, told the guy he needed to at least fix the previously working tests, got tons of slop like changing assert 200 to 500.

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

#35

Post by MattGaiser »

ColdStream wrote: post #27
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.

A lot of LLMisms are just poor flowing writing, no matter what the use case.

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

#36

Post by deliciousonion »

This particular implementation of the test seems flawed. The “invisible text” which would be read by a screen reader or visible if the problem statement were copied to some persistent scratch space while drafting a response would specify the inclusion of the word whether or not the author is an LLM.

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

#37

Post by arealaccount »

When I was in college we had a professor that would assign a 20ish page paper due every other Saturday.

One of the students was certain the reports were not reviewed and just given a vibes grade based on the student.

So he handed in pages of literally “blaah blaaaah blaaah…” and got an A

Somehow feels relevant to this article

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

#38

Post by mvkel »

I'm not disputing that students cheat using AI, and that professors catch them and enact consequences.

But this video is a little suspicious. The fact that none of the 32 students bothered to even read the generated output feels strange. Or that those students didn't notice the extremely obvious white text at the bottom of the question when copy/pasting the assignment.

Combined with a TikTok account of a person who is clearly participating in the attention economy, I am skeptical.

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

#39

Post by icedchai »

Diogenesian wrote: post #15
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.

It is too late for the current crop of university students. Most of them should have never graduated middle school. The failure is very deep.

Also consider many of them had their education destroyed by "remote learning" during covid.

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

#40

Post by Catloafdev »

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…

> I would say any AI generated output... would have been extremely easy to detect

> I write everything using AI and nobody has detected it

Might need to rethink this one, Googling 'how to use AI to write for me and not get caught' isn't exactly some black magic skill.

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