A very clever professor in Mississippi decided to test and see if his students were cheating using AI. So he put some code in his exam instructions using white font that couldn’t be seen by the students, but could be seen by an AI if a copy/paste was used.
Jason Gibson, a history professor at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, secretly embedded a hidden prompt in the exam instructions using a white font, invisible to students but readable by AI chatbots if the instructions were copied and pasted. The prompt instructed the AI to randomly insert absurd nonsense about Madagascar into every response.
Instead of answering questions about the Industrial Revolution, dozens of students unknowingly turned in essays declaring that “Madagascar floats sideways through the afternoon,” that “Madagascar purple bicycle whispers to the ceiling,” and that the island nation had somehow “wore a toaster to a basketball game.”
The bizarre answers immediately gave the game away. “Thirty-two of my 35 students between two classes failed a portion of their midterm because they all used AI to generate their entire response,” Gibson said in a viral video online. “And apparently they didn’t proofread it.”
There’s a lot of people, not just students, who rely on AI, but don’t have either the wherewithal or the intelligence to actually check the output.
I wonder if the other three actually just proofed the output from whatever AI they used because I’m cynical enough to think they couldn’t resist cheating.
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