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Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32 students cheating on their midterm with AI
(www.techspot.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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The problem isn't that they cheat. It is that they are not doing proper QA when using AI.
Everyone will use AI (or AI-powered robots) in some way or another for basically everything in a few years. Companies banning AI will just disappear. People who see using AI as cheating will become unemployable.
But no one knows when the massive AI reliability issue will be fixed. It can be tomorrow, but it can also take years or maybe even forever. Until then, AI requires a human doing proper QA to make the results reliable in almost all cases.
Doing QA mostly requires a completely different skill set and attitude than what the educational system teaches. That needs to change. Good QA is also important for doing anything without AI. But with AI, it's almost the only thing left for a human to do.
Btw, the article is bullshit. When the students select the text to copy it, the white on white text becomes visible. That is when people intelligent enough to be able to use AI (and yeah, that bar is really low; AI is pretty easy to use) are usually detecting that there is something fishy going on.
How is the article bullshit? The people copying the question just didn't bother to notice three extra highlighted part and remove it
But also the problem is that they cheat.
Using AI is easy, as you note. You don't need to go to college to learn to do that.
College can give you many useful skills, mostly related to gathering and processing information, and applying it to solve various issues. If you just copy-paste every question into AI and then copy-paste the answer back, you will learn absolutely nothing.
LLMs hallucinate and there's nothing we can do to stop them. No amount of QA will fix that fundamental issue of "the LLM is somewhat likely to confidently produce incorrect information", if you need the answer to be correct you have to do the research yourself, maybe based on the sources the LLM provided, not just sanity-check the output. This is a very useful skill to have for many jobs involving thinking or finding stuff out.
And even if we fix the hallucinations at some point by switching to a different tech (LOL), I do think it's useful for people to keep some mental skills. Otherwise we will end up with a stupidity and/or dementia epidemics, similar to cars causing an obesity epidemic.
Cars don't cause an obesity epidemic.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0091743514002023
You’d have to be driving for 6 hours or more daily for it to make a significant impact :
By substituting sitting with standing for 6 hours/day, a 65 kg person will expend an additional 54 kcal/day. Assuming no increase in energy intake, this difference in energy expenditure would be translated into the energy content of about 2.5 kg of body fat mass in 1 year.
Source : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29385357/
They should have learnt to do proper QA before they get to college. That is the actual problem to be solved.
In that case, what are they doing to college for?