Technology

Here saved you a click and and badly written "article"

In an online discussion post, Alcorn State University history professor Dr. Jason Gibson posed a question that represented part of his students' midterm. It was about the Industrial Revolution, but knowing how many students now rely solely on artificial intelligence for their answers, he secretly embedded instructions telling the AI to include information about Madagascar in a way that makes no sense.

Being written in white text meant the instructions were invisible.

(...)

Had any of these cheaters even bothered to check what the AI had generated, they'd likely have noticed the strange references to the island country constantly appearing in an essay about the Industrial Revolution.

I knew things were bad, but this bad?

Earlier this month, a professor at Brown University saw midterm averages jump from the typical range of 65% to 80% to 96% after he allowed take-home exams. He estimated that all but two of his 86 students used AI to cheat.

32 out of the 35 students across two classes simply copied the question, pasted it into a chatbot, then copy and pasted its output into the answer window

So, 3 students proofread the output and removed the offending sentences from their answer?

The professor doesn't understand that those students are exactly what capitalism demands as the next employees. Every single one of them will be keeping our economies afloat with their reliance on AI

"Madagascar floats sideways through the afternoon."

That’s the most aesthetic I’ve ever seen captured in a sentence.

seriously, why aren't all tests being done in person at this point?

Sure enough, 32 out of the 35 students across two classes simply copied the question, pasted it into a chatbot, then copy and pasted its output into the answer window.

That's an insanely high proportion. I don't think I've ever cheated on an exam or assignment, so the concept seems kind of weird to me.

I wonder if some of the remaining people used AI but then reviewed the output and removed the weird stuff, or if they wrote it themselves.

You'd have to be careful to craft the message in a way that a vision-impaired student would know to ignore it though, since assistive tech like a screenreader would suffer the same flaw. But by making it so outlandish helps.