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My university uses prompt injection to catch cheaters

varun.ch

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Re: My university uses prompt injection to catch cheaters

#41

Post by dpoloncsak »

ushtaritk421 wrote: post #29
dpoloncsak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Expecting a kid to run a mile in Physical Education class rather than call Uber is not denying technical progress, nor is it hurting their ability to call Uber later when it is appropriate.

Right, you're describing a curriculum clearly centered around a visible indication that the student is learning and performing. That's what I'm suggesting as well.

'AI Traps' will just forever be a game of cat-and-mouse. We need an education overhaul. School faculty should be less focused on catching LLM use, and more focused on teaching lessons that can't be easily bullshit by AI

Re: My university uses prompt injection to catch cheaters

#42

Post by dpoloncsak »

Larrikin wrote: post #28
dpoloncsak wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does learning to use them via the completely unstructured process of getting output past an overworked teacher out of their depth develop critical skills? Nobody said it did. The point isn't to get it past a teacher. The point is to develop a curriculum that encourages growth with technology as opposed to demonizing it

Every single actually good student learned information in the school and various skills outside of school. The tech is changing so much currently it would be a waste of time for a teacher to try and plan a year long course around them.

I'm not suggesting to plan a course around using ChatGPT. I just think we're seeing the idea of 'essays and paragraph-based replies to generic questions' be defeated in real-time. There has to be a better way to get quantifiable results than what we currently have

Re: My university uses prompt injection to catch cheaters

#43

Post by dpoloncsak »

710dev wrote: post #38
dpoloncsak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Go apply for a job and tell the interviewer that you refuse to use LLMs.

You'll be overlooked for someone who is 'current'

Atleast in both my last company and current one, brass was pushing to have copilot rewrite your emails...to the annoyance of most users

Re: My university uses prompt injection to catch cheaters

#44

Post by dpoloncsak »

FuckButtons wrote: post #35
dpoloncsak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If you’re getting prompt injected, you have skipped right passed thinking critically about what you’re doing and into the same level of intellectual dishonesty as cheating, ie, not learning the thing and then attempting to still attain a grade for work not done.

Agreed, but already in this same comment section there are people speculating on ways to defeat this, like a small model just to detect prompt injections. Students will catch on quick, and any novel trick you deploy will be killed by word-of-mouth once the first round of grades come back. I understand the need to do something, but it feels like a band-aid solution on a hemorrhaging gash. I don't think 'AI traps' are a viable solution moving forward for education

Re: My university uses prompt injection to catch cheaters

#45

Post by dpoloncsak »

cwillu wrote: post #37
dpoloncsak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Yesterday someone shouted across the room at me “hey, what's 43 divided by 2?” The point isn't that you won't have a calculator, the point is that you shouldn't need to pull out a calculator for every little operation. We drive everywhere, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to walk a mile if necessary. Failing to develop basic mental arithmetic skills is not a flex.

Right. We had to 'show our work' to prove we didn't use a calculator in school in situations where it was prohibited. This provided teachers proof that we understood the fundamentals.

Is there an equivalent to showing your work for writing? Seems like modern LLMs can already mock up a 'draft' and a 'outline' or whatever 'showing your work' would be for an essay

Re: My university uses prompt injection to catch cheaters

#46

Post by nomel »

wildzzz wrote: post #19
dpoloncsak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It really depends on the field you go into. If you're a writer and you want a job writing things, you go to college to become a better writer and prepare yourself for working in that industry. If the professors just let you turn in AI slop, how does that benefit anyone? You didn't write anything, why are you here paying tuition? And it demonstrates to the industry that if colleges are handing out degrees to writers f…

> You go to school to learn.

This is not the mindset of very many people. They go to school because it's a requirement to get a job.

Talk to someone in college, or especially a trade school, and you'll see that the overwhelming majority are cheating, especially those from lower trust cultures. I work at a FAANG and, in casual conversation, many of my colleagues admitted to cheating with a dismissive "everyone does it".

Re: My university uses prompt injection to catch cheaters

#47

Post by eden-u4 »

anuramat wrote: post #33
lukewarm707 wrote: post #14

i wonder why the labs don't put a small model for detecting prompt injection in front of the main llm. it's 20b at most and it can work quite well. for now you can proxy http through llama guard. 'luxury' security if you can build and pay. is there an architectural limitation?

why would you train a separate model?

Guardrailing is usually done with a smaller model (< 1b) to filter out simple "not aligned prompt" and not waste compute.

Re: My university uses prompt injection to catch cheaters

#48

Post by nomel »

dpoloncsak wrote: post #25
wildzzz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on the field you go into. If you're a writer and you want a job writing things, you go to college to become a better writer and prepare yourself for working in that industry. If the professors just let you turn in AI slop, how does that benefit anyone? You didn't write anything, why are you here paying tuition? And it demonstrates to the industry that if colleges are handing out degrees to writers f…

Writing specifically, I'll concede may need some oversight to prevent LLM use. In general though, we should be looking at how to re-design assignments to demonstrate an understanding without being a large block of text, atleast imo. We (Or atleast, my school) started teaching us how to use a calculator in things like Trig and Calc. It's not about 'can you divide correctly to arrive at the correct value of sin' but 'c…

In person proctored exams, with individually randomized questions from a large pool, along with written answers completed during the test, like required for state certifications, are probably the only answer.

The popular way to get around video chat proctoring is to physically attach notes to your screen, so when you sweep the room with the built in camera, it doesn't see anything.

Re: My university uses prompt injection to catch cheaters

#50

Post by petterroea »

chiffaa wrote: post #13
petterroea wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The student is attending college to get a job. Most students don't care about the course. Probably around 50% of students in my year were only in it for the well paying jobs a prestigious degree like that could give them. This has to be part of the threat model for cheating.

I am in my final year of my bachelors in Software Engineering. I was (mostly still am) very interested in both SWE and CS in various angles - I studied a decent bit of PL theory, I tried to get into systems programming, I've built a bunch of "portfolio crud" software and had a short internship in a real company, with all of the above being roughly equally interesting to me. All this is to say I genuinely love the fie…

I know many people who were in the exact same situation as you while at uni. I hope you find value.

For me, my hobbies probably gave me 2x more experience, but uni forced me to learn things i would have never learned by myself. It made me believe self taught engineers were inherently flawed from only knowing what they themselves thought was important.

I'm sure you'll find value at the end, but I think you are valid in feeling you are wasting time.

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