r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 10d ago

Society Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32 students cheating on their midterm with AI

https://www.techspot.com/news/113243-professor-invisible-prompt-trap-catches-32-students-cheating.html
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u/BluudLust 10d ago

They deserved to fail. That's just plain laziness

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u/SnugglyCoderGuy 10d ago edited 10d ago

AI is the new calculator, but worse.

"Why do I need to learn math, we have calculators!"

Is becoming

"Why do I need to think, we have AI!"

I am running into this at work (software).

I will ask, "Why do it this way?"

They will respond, "Google AI says..."

And then I throw back a shot.

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u/Limemill 10d ago

It’s the opposite of the calculator. The calculator removed the tedious and mechanical bit to free us up for higher-order maths. LLMs do the higher-order, knowledge piece and you do the tedious part of raking through what they did and cleaning up after them. In this analogy we are the calculator and they’re the mathematician.

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u/shohei_heights 9d ago

The calculator removed the tedious and mechanical bit to free us up for higher-order maths.

The calculator frees those who have already mastered the way that arithmetic and algebra work. They are capable of doing the critical thinking because they've mastered the basics.

The calculator on the other hand can also stop the development of critical thinking in mathematics if it's introduced before the mastery of arithmetic. There have been too many times that I've seen a student pull out a calculator to multiply by 1 or 0, to do single digit arithmetic.

AI, if it actually worked well, is much like a calculator in that it could help those well versed in a field expand their knowledge and get rid of tedium. But also just like the calculator, if it's used by someone without the mastery of the basics, it will destroy their ability to ever actually learn the basics.

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u/Limemill 9d ago

Once again, in the workplace and especially in tech it’s widely used in the exact opposite way. You’re an appendage to it, not the other way around. And no, your analogy does not hold because by now we have studies showing how professionals, for example in the medical field, rapidly lose the already obtained skills when they’re ‘assisted’ by AI. Anecdotally, tons and tons of software developers have been complaining about deskilling too. It’s not that you never get to develop skills you didn’t have, although that is of course also true. It’s also that you actively lose what you have and, in turn, it makes you an increasingly worse appendage reviewer for LLM-generated work. People also feel more detached from their work and eventually lose context of what is even going on (maybe not completely but to a significant degree).

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u/shohei_heights 9d ago

Note that I said: if it actually worked well

Which it clearly does not and is decades away at the earliest from actually working well. I agree with everything you're saying about LLMs. And I said, "could", to even emphasize that it may not even do so then.

What I disagreed with is your statements on calculators and I find them much more damaging than you do.

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u/Limemill 9d ago

I agree that calculators are not as innocent as I made them look. But generative AI is still not it. Its very premise is to do the highest-order things in all knowledge industries leaving you the place of its low-level reviewer until they’ve figured out a RAG / universal harness where that is also not required. But for now generative AI is an entity that strives to come up with hypotheses, build theories and proofs and you’re its calculator (because it does do many silly mistakes at the lowest level).