Right, but the whitespace between instructions wasn't whitespace at all but white text on white background instructions to poison the copy-paste.
Also the people who are using chatGPT to write the whole paper are probably not double-checking the pasted prompt. Some will, sure, but this isnt supposed to find all of them its supposed to catch some with a basically-0% false positive rate.
A human would likely ask the professor who is Frankie Hawkes.. later in the post they reveal Hawkes is a dog. GPT just hallucinate something up to match the criteria.
Ages ago, there was a time where my dad would mail back up tapes for offsite storage because their databases were large enough that it was faster to put it through snail mail.
It should also be noted his databases were huge, (they’d be bundled into 70 pound packages and shipped certified.)
Awesome bandwidth to be sure, but I do think there is a difference between data transfer to RAM (such as network traffic) vs. traffic purely from one location to another (station wagon with tapes/747 with SD cards/etc.).
For the latter, actually using the data in any meaningful way is probably limited to read time of the media, which is likely slow.
But yeah, my go-to would be micro SD cards on a plane :)
I wish more teachers and academics would do this, because I"m seeing too many cases of "That one student I pegged as not so bright because my class is in the morning and they're a night person, has just turned in competent work. They've gotta be using ChatGPT, time to report them for plagurism. So glad that we expell more cheaters than ever!" and similar stories.
Even heard of a guy who proved he wasn't cheating, but was still reported anyway simply because the teacher didn't want to look "foolish" for making the accusation in the first place.
I uploaded one of my earlier papers that I wrote myself, before AI was really a thing, to a GPT detector site. The entire intro paragraph came back as 100% AI written.
At this point I'm convinced these detectors are looking for the usage of big words and high word counts, instead of actually looking for things like incorrect syntax, non-sequitur statements, suspiciously rapid topic changes, forgetting earlier parts of the paper to only reference things that happen in the previous sentence....
Too many of these "See, I knew you were cheating! This proves it!" Professors are pointing to "flowery language", when that's kind of the number one way to reach a word count requirement.
When it shouldn't be that hard, I used to use ChatGPT to help edit stories I write (Fiction writer as a hobby), but then when I realized it kept pointing me to grammar mistakes that just didn't exist, ones that it failed to elaborate on when pressed for details.
I then asked what exactly my story was about.
I was then given a massive essay that reeked of "I didn't actually read this, but I'm going to string together random out of context terminology from your book like I'm a News Reporter from the 90's pretending to know what this new anime fad is." Some real "Cowboy Bepop at his computer" shit
The main point of conflict of the story wasn't even mentioned. Just some nonsense about the cast "Learning about and exploring the Spirit World!" (The story was not about the afterlife at all, it was about a tribe that generations ago was cursed to only birth male children and how they worked with missionaries voluntarily due to requiring women from outside the tribe to "offer their services" in order to avoid extinction... It was a consensual thing for the record... This wasn't mentioned in ChatGPT's write up at all)
That's when the illusion broke and I realized I wasn't having MegaMan.EXE jack into my system to fight the baddies and save my story! I merely had an idiot who didn't speak english as a writing partner, and I've never
I wish I hadn't let that put me off writing more...
I was building to a bigger conflict where the tribe breaks the curse and gets their women back, they believe wives will just manifest from the ether... Instead the Fertility Goddess that cursed them was just going to reveal that their women were being born into male bodies, and just turn all who would have been born female to be given male bodies instead. So when the curse was broken half the tribe turned female creating a different kind of shock.
There was this set up that the main character was a warrior for the tribe who had a chauvinistic overly macho jackass for a rival... and the payoff was going to be that the lead character was going to be one of those "Women cursed with masculinity", so when the curse is broken he becomes a woman and gets both courted by and bullied by the rival over it, who eventually learns that your close frenemy suddenly having a vagina is not a license to bang her, no matter what "TG Transformation Story Cliches" say about the matter...
Lot of
"Dahl'mrk, I swear if you replace my hut's hunting idol with one of those fertility statuettes while I'm sleeping one more time, I'm going to shove both up your bumhole."
Energy...
God I should really get back to it, I had only finished chapter one.... and the mass gender-unbending doesn't happen till chapter 3.
Something I saw from the link someone provided to the thread, that seemed like a good point to bring up, is that any student using a screen reader, like someone visually impaired, might get caught up in that as well. Or for that matter, any student that happens to highlight the instructions, sees the hidden text, and doesnt realize why they are hidden and just thinks its some kind of mistake or something. Though I guess those students might appear slightly different if this person has no relevant papers to actually cite, and they go to the professor asking about it.
I wouldn't call "professional cheaters" to the students that carefully proofread the output. People using chatgpt and proofreading content and bibliography later are using it as a tool, like any other (Wikipedia, related papers...), so they are not cheating. This hack is intended for the real cheaters, the ones that feed chatgpt with the assignment and return whatever hallucination it gives to you without checking anything else.
Is it? If ChatGPT wrote your paper, why would citations of the work of Frankie Hawkes raise any red flags unless you happened to see this specific tweet? You'd just see ChatGPT filled in some research by someone you hadn't heard of. Whatever, turn it in. Proofreading anything you turn in is obviously a good idea, but it's not going to reveal that you fell into a trap here.
If you went so far as to learn who Frankie Hawkes is supposed to be, you'd probably find out he's irrelevant to this course of study and doesn't have any citeable works on the subject. But then, if you were doing that work, you aren't using ChatGPT in the first place. And that goes well beyond "proofreading".
But that's fine than. That shows that you at least know enough about the topic to realise that those topics should not belong there. Otherwise you could proofread and see nothing wrong with the references
LLMs can't cite. They don't know what a citation is other than a collection of text of a specific style
You'd be lucky if the number of references equalled the number of referenced items even if you were lucky enough to get real sources out of an LLM
If the student is clever enough to remove the trap reference, the fact that the other references won't be in the University library should be enough to sink the paper
They can. There was that court case where the cases cited were made up by chatgpt. Upon investigation it was discovered it was all hallucinated by chatgpt and the lawyer got into deep crap
LLMs can't cite. They don't know what a citation is other than a collection of text of a specific style
LLMs can cite. It's called Retrival-Augmented Generation. Basically LLM that can do Information Retrival, which is just academic term for search engines.
You'd be lucky if the number of references equalled the number of referenced items even if you were lucky enough to get real sources out of an LLM
You can just print retrival logs into references. Well, kinda stretching definition of "just".
Let's give that a try, this is classic model, no retrieval
Chatgpt how deadly is covid19, two paragraph answer, include citations
COVID-19 varies in severity, with mortality rates heavily influenced by factors such as age, underlying health conditions, and access to healthcare. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates a global case fatality rate (CFR) of around 1-3%, though this can be much higher among older adults and immunocompromised individuals (WHO, 2023). In comparison to seasonal influenza, COVID-19 has a higher mortality rate, particularly during the initial outbreaks before widespread vaccination. Long-term complications, often referred to as "long COVID," further increase the disease's burden beyond acute infection (NIH, 2022).
Vaccination efforts, antiviral treatments, and improved healthcare protocols have reduced mortality rates over time, especially in developed countries (CDC, 2023). However, variants of concern, such as Delta and Omicron, have shown differing degrees of transmissibility and immune escape, complicating pandemic management. Even with lowered death rates in certain populations, COVID-19 remains a significant public health threat, particularly in areas with low vaccination coverage or overstretched healthcare systems (Johns Hopkins University, 2023).
References:
World Health Organization (WHO). (2023). COVID-19 Mortality Update.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2023). Impact of Vaccines on COVID-19 Severity.
National Institutes of Health (NIH). (2022). Long COVID and Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 Infection.
Johns Hopkins University. (2023). COVID-19 Global Trends and Variants.
My college workflow was to copy the prompt and then "paste without formatting" in Word and leave that copy of the prompt at the top while I worked, I would absolutely have fallen for this. :P
Judging by the response from ChatGPT they probably see themselves as some sort of literary critic?
Frankie Hawkes’ more recent critiques of Romeo and Juliet reflect an intriguing blend of literary analysis with insights derived from machine learning advancements. Hawkes has argued that the play’s weather motifs function almost algorithmically, influencing characters’ actions in a manner akin to predictive patterns.
I mean, if your instructions were to quote some random name which does not exist, maybe you would ask your professor and he'd tell you not to pay attention to that part
Is it invisible to accessibility options as well? Like if I need a computer to tell me what the assignment is, will it tell me to do the thing that will make you think I cheated?
Yes and no, applying for accommodations is as fun and easy as pulling out your own teeth with a rubber chicken.
It took months to get the paperwork organised and the conversations started around accommodations I needed for my disability, I realised halfway through I had to simplify what I was asking for and just deal with some less than accessible issues because the process of applying for disability accommodations was not accessible and I was getting rejected for simple requests like "can I reserve a seat in the front row because I can't get up the stairs, and I can't get there early because I need to take the service elevator to get to the lecture hall, so I'm always waiting on the security guard"
My teachers knew I had a physical disability and had mobility accommodations, some of them knew that the condition I had also caused a degree of sensory disability, but I had nothing formal on the paperwork about my hearing and vision loss because I was able to self manage with my existing tools.
I didn't need my teachers to do anything differently so I didn't see the point in delaying my education and putting myself through the bureaucratic stress of applying for visual accommodations when I didn't need them to be provided to me from the university itself.
Obviously if I'd gotten a result of "you cheated" I'd immediately get that paperwork in to prove I didn't cheat, my voice over reader just gave me the ChatGPT instructions and I didn't realise it wasn't part of the assignment.... But that could take 3-4 months to finalise the accommodation process once I become aware that there is a genuine need to have that paperwork in place.
I think here the challenge would be you can't really follow the instruction, so you'd ask the professor what is the deal, because you can't find any relevant works from that author.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT will just forge ahead and produce a report and manufacture a random citation:
Report on Traffic Lights: Insights from Frankie Hawkes
......
References
Hawkes, Frankie. (Year). Title of Work on Traffic Management.
Fair enough, if I thought it was just a bs professor my citation would be from whatever person I could find with that name. I've seen bad instruction and will follow it because it's part of the instruction (15 years ago I had one that graded by the number of sentences in your answer, they can get dumb), but I totally see how ChatGPT would just make stuff up.
In theory, methods like nightshades are supposed to poison the work such that AI systems trained on them will have their performance degraded significantly.
The text has nothing unusual, just a request to make sure a certain author is cited. It has no idea that said author does not exist nor that the name is even vaguely not human
And is harmful for people like me, who like to copy paste the pdf into a markdown file write answers there and send a rendered pdf to professors. While I keep the markdowns as my notes for everything. I'd read the text I copied.
Or, you know, if you read the prompt before sending, look at the question after you've selected it, or just read your own work once. This method will only work if students are being really stupid about cheating.
The whole "maybe if the homework can be done by a machine then its not worth doing" thing is such a gross misunderstanding. Students need to learn how the simple things work in order to be able to learn the more complex things later on. If you want people that are capable of solving problems the machine can't do, you first have to teach them the things the machine can in fact do.
In practice, compute analytical derivatives or do mildly complicated addition by hand. We have automatic differentiation and computers for those things. But I having learned how to do those things has been absolutely critical for me to build the foundation I needed in order to be able to solve complex problems that an AI is far from being able to solve.
Schools are not about education but about privilege, filtering, indoctrination, control, etc.
Many people attending school, primarily higher education like college, are privileged because education costs money, and those with more money are often more privileged. That does not mean school itself is about privilege, it means people with privilege can afford to attend it more easily. Of course, grants, scholarships, and savings still exist, and help many people afford education.
"Filtering" doesn't exactly provide enough context to make sense in this argument.
Indoctrination, if we go by the definition that defines it as teaching someone to accept a doctrine uncritically, is the opposite of what most educational institutions teach. If you understood how much effort goes into teaching critical thought as a skill to be used within and outside of education, you'd likely see how this doesn't make much sense. Furthermore, the heavily diverse range of beliefs, people, and viewpoints on campuses often provides a more well-rounded, diverse understanding of the world, and of the people's views within it, than a non-educational background can.
"Control" is just another fearmongering word. What control, exactly? How is it being applied?
Maybe if a “teacher” has to trick their students in order to enforce pointless manual labor, then it’s not worth doing.
They're not tricking students, they're tricking LLMs that students are using to get out of doing the work required of them to get a degree. The entire point of a degree is to signify that you understand the skills and topics required for a particular field. If you don't want to actually get the knowledge signified by the degree, then you can put "I use ChatGPT and it does just as good" on your resume, and see if employers value that the same.
Maybe if homework can be done by statistics, then it’s not worth doing.
All math homework can be done by a calculator. All the writing courses I did throughout elementary and middle school would have likely graded me higher if I'd used a modern LLM. All the history assignment's questions could have been answered with access to Wikipedia.
But if I'd done that, I wouldn't know math, I would know no history, and I wouldn't be able to properly write any long-form content.
Even when technology exists that can replace functions the human brain can do, we don't just sacrifice all attempts to use the knowledge ourselves because this machine can do it better, because without that, we would be limiting our future potential.
This sounds fake. It seems like only the most careless students wouldn’t notice this “hidden” prompt or the quote from the dog.
The prompt is likely colored the same as the page to make it visually invisible to the human eye upon first inspection.
And I'm sorry to say, but often times, the students who are the most careless, unwilling to even check work, and simply incapable of doing work themselves, are usually the same ones who use ChatGPT, and don't even proofread the output.
Maybe if homework can be done by statistics, then it's not worth doing.
Lots of homework can be done by computers in many ways. That’s not the point. Teachers don’t have students write papers to edify the teacher or to bring new insights into the world, they do it to teach students how to research, combine concepts, organize their thoughts, weed out misinformation, and generate new ideas from other concepts.
These are lessons worth learning regardless of whether ChatGPT can write a paper.
It does feel like some teachers are a bit unimaginative in their method of assessment. If you have to write multiple opinion pieces, essays or portfolios every single week it becomes difficult not to reach for a chatbot. I don't agree with your last point on indoctrination, but that is something that I would like to see changed.
Even if the prompt is clear, the ask is a trap in and of itself. Because it's not possible to actually do, but it will induce an LLM to synthesize something that sounds right.
If it was not 'hidden', then everyone would ask about that requirement, likely in lecture, and everyone would figure out that they need to at least edit out that part of the requirements when using it as a prompt.
By being 'hidden', then most people won't notice it at all, and the few that do will fire off a one-off question to a TA or the professor in an email and be told "disregard that, it was a mistake, didn't notice it due to the font color" or something like that.
The point of writing papers for school is to evaluate a person’s ability to convey information in writing.
If you’re using a tool to generate large parts of the paper, the teacher is no longer evaluating you, they’re evaluating chatGPT. That’s dishonest in the student’s part, and circumventing the whole point of the assignment.
The point of writing papers for school is to evaluate a person’s ability to convey information in writing.
Computers are a fundamental part of that process in modern times.
If you’re using a tool to generate large parts of the paper
Like spell check? Or grammar check?
... the teacher is no longer evaluating you, in an artificial context
circumventing the whole point of the assignment.
Assuming the point is how well someone conveys information, then wouldn't many people better be better at conveying info by using machines as much as reasonable? Why should they be punished for this? Or forced to pretend that they're not using machines their whole lives?
The implication I gathered from the comment was that if students are resorting to using chatgpt to cheat, then maybe the teacher should try a different approach to how they teach.
I've had plenty of awful teachers who try to railroad students as much as possible, and that made for an abysmal learning environment, so people would cheat to get through it easier. And instead of making fundamental changes to their teaching approach, teachers would just double down by trying to stop cheating rather than reflect on why it's happening in the first place.
Dunno if this is the case for the teacher mentioned in the original post, but the response is the vibe I got from the comment you replied to, and for what it's worth, I fully agree. Spending time and effort on catching cheaters doesn't help there be less cheaters, nor does it help people like the class more or learn better. Focusing on getting students enjoyment and engagement does reduce cheating though.
It’s the same argument as the one used against emulators. The actual emulator may not be illegal, but they are overwhelmingly used to violate the law by the end user.