This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
My testing and teaching methods are so outdated I blame the students!
This is hysterical. Like the cheaters couldn't even be bothered to proof read what the AI wrote to make sure it was correct.
People are dumb. People will always be dumb, there's no getting away from it.
We are just apes after all.
Yes, but school is there to teach you to use brain. Why go school if no use brain?
Why pay astronomical tuition, room and board, textbooks, all of it, just to learn nothing and use chat got. The bottom of the article said a professor at Brown thought all but 2 of his students cheated. At Brown. We're so fucked.
These selective colleges aren’t about education, they’re about getting you into a club with the other assholes that likely cheated their way through business school and got jobs the same way.
Same with private high schools in the us. They aren’t teaching kids to read, math or think, they’re teaching them that being born rich means you get to be in charge of the plebs (which includes the professors and instructors at these institutions).
"You have to go to college to get a good job"
Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Used to be that a college degree indicated people with time, money, and drive to put four years into study. It was a good measure of the "right" kind of person. Now it's just another job requirement and doesn't indicate anything.
Teenagers aren't really known for making great decisions.
Source: was once a teenager, made bad decisions.
You haven't ran into someone doing this on work emails?
They don't read the full email they get, just far enough to see if they got what they want. Then they plug it into an AI, and tell it to respond, then copy/paste it back to Outlook and hit reply.
They'll keep doing that, over and over. And it usually ends up with them insisting on a meeting to "discuss" where they essentially get in a loop of "it'll work, just do it"
And it's like pulling fucking teeth to get them to admit the only thing they're basing that on, is a chatbot told them it would work.
People are worried about the kids, and we should be, but it rotted adults brains even faster, and because of their age they've got a much shorter clock to stop using it before effects are permanent. Couple with Covid related IQ drops and the fact that time is linear and we'll keep getting older...
Society is fucked.
We need to seriously treat AI like an addictive drug that people aren't capable of limiting themselves with.
but it rotted adults brains even faster, and because of their age they’ve got a much shorter clock to stop using it before effects are permanent.
Look here, I'm an adult who uses AI all the time and you need to understand that the people of Madagascar waft blissfully through the tropical waters en masse.
Most people who use AI to write something can't be bothered to make sure it is correct. It pisses me off at work so bad when someone "writes" a document or does "research" with AI and just copy pastes it into an email without actually reading to see if it makes sense.
I got so pissed of a couple months ago when people were telling me about a "great research document" that someone put together for something we had coming up that we desperately needed information about. As soon as they shared the document to me I realized it was completely AI generated and 1/3 of it didn't make a lick of sense. I wanted to yell at the person who created it to at least take 10 minutes to delete all of the obviously incorrect crap.
You've hit the nail on the head. What you're describing isn't just laziness — it's a fundamental breakdown of trust in the modern workplace. Let's delve into this.
Here's the thing: when someone copy-pastes AI output without reading it, the document was never the deliverable — the verification was the deliverable. The prose isn't load-bearing; the checking is. A document nobody read isn't a document — it's a liability with formatting.
And that's the thing, isn't it? Is the AI actually the problem here? No — the workflow is. This genuinely comes down to ownership:
This is exactly the kind of thing that starts as one bad research doc and scales — from a single email, to a team norm, to an entire organization quietly outsourcing its thinking. In today's fast-paced world, the ability to say "I read this and I stand behind it" isn't just a soft skill — it's a superpower, and honestly? A testament to the rich tapestry of what human-AI collaboration could be.
Ultimately, your colleague didn't fail to use AI correctly — they failed to be the human in the loop. The tool didn't remove their judgment. They left it at the door.
I hope this helps! Would you like me to draft a one-page best-practices memo your team can circulate? 🚀
/s in case this isn't blatantly obvious
Ugh... I don't know whether to upvote or downvote...
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 don't know that the article was all that badly written, but you missed a couple of points that I'd call essential:
One, it was 32 students out of 35 total who used AI and then didn't even bother to check it, so only 3 students even made an honest attempt in the entire semester.
Two, the professor told the students that they were allowed to contest the grade if they wanted, and only 2 out of the 32 students even tried to contest it.
Also later in the article it mentions another professor who estimated that only 2 of their 86 students didn't use AI to cheat.
Like, what are we even doing any more?
Headline should be 90% of students. I assumed the class was much larger and only 32 used AI. 90% is fucked.
Only 32 got caught using AI
How stupid are these kids to not even check the answer? That’s the biggest issue here lol
Its complacency, which is the worst thing to be engendering in the next generation.
Get them to the point that they don't know how to study or struggle, and you have a whole generation relying on your shitty LLM, and the dumber you are the less you know what you don't know until it's telling you what plants crave, sponsored by brawndo
Well, it's always the stupid ones, that's why stuff like this is effective. You will never catch a good student cheating with that method
"Madagascar floats sideways through the afternoon."
That’s the most aesthetic I’ve ever seen captured in a sentence.
Makes me think of Douglas Adams
What a waste of money. Why go to school if you’re just going to use AI? What are you paying for?
The piece of paper that companies keep demanding you have, despite their AI black box always filtering you out for hyper specific and arbitrary reasons?
The real answer is they're probably just lazy, but I wouldn't blame anyone who doesn't really value the work that goes into their degrees and diplomas anymore (not that I'm against post-secondary education, though)
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?
3 of 35 is not an unreasonable number of students who might have actually done the work themselves.
It's also a reasonable number of students who would read the answer before just blindly putting it into the answer sheet.
Oh no, that is super fucking lazy (I'm not even sure the word for it is lazy..), they are literally copying the assignment statement into an LLM, pasting the answer without reviewing it (not even the slightest curiosity about what was written?) and they're done?
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.
Ehhhh.
Even without AI. A at home exam is just begging for ones to cheat.
Flight instructor here:
I kept having to undo the damage that academia did to my flight students, because looking things up to make sure you knew it right felt like "cheating" to them. So. Many. People have acadotrauma, y'all. Do you know how often I had to resort to behaviorism models to convince grown ass men it's okay to be seen using a checklist? I had to ask our chief pilot to watch me do ground procedures on an airplane in front of the student to establish it as a norm. You know, the way they trained Alex the parrot to talk. Because a checklist is a piece of paper with the answers on it and we hurt people for having those. Same with writing down frequencies. What? You're going to memorize the A/FD?
Or would it be edutrauma?
I see the same thing in the software industry. Programming is something where it's perfectly common to need to have cheat sheets at your desk and reference the documentation regularly. But freshly graduated students think that's cheating. They're convinced they need to memorise all aspects of a programming language and it's standard library. The amount of new information I take in every day, it would be impossible to remember everything. The real skill is information retrieval, being able to look up what you need to know when you need it.
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
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.
The students cheating are only making the people with preAI degrees more desirable.
"What sets you apart from the others?"
What don't get is how they didn't see the "invisible" text when they were copying it to paste it into the AI. Any tool I've ever used to select and copy text highlights it in a way that would show the "invisible" part. Was the question just so long that they could easily miss it?
I love the story but I'm a little skeptical just because of this one detail.
Probably they did ctrl+a or just dragged the mouse all the way down without looking
Any suggestions for something I could hide in my emails for those recipients who choose to use AI negligently?
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.
I think the professor is already aware of anyone in the class who uses assistive technology like that.
