Students secretly use AI to gain an advantage at the university. A lecturer has had enough and used a hidden instruction to expose the cheaters.
What did the person do? History professor Will Teague from the State University in San Angelo reports on the news site Huffpost that some students have been using AI in their assignments since 2023, and he caught them with a trick.
According to Will Teague, he supposedly hid an invisible text passage as a “Trojan horse” within his assignments. This passage is said to be readable only by an AI when the assignment is processed. For students who do not use AI tools, there would be no difference.
The hidden instruction is supposed to refer to a non-relevant topic and generate false statements. This way, the university staff member could distinguish between AI-generated work and self-written text. Not only does the history professor see issues with the use of AI, another lecturer goes even further and explains how AI reveals the broken system of the university.
Surprising result after the first attempt
How did the experiment end? After submission, the professor checked the assignments for the hidden instruction and found that over a third of his students would be using AI.
In total, out of the 122 submitted assignments, 33 were processed with AI. After revealing his experiment, 14 more students confessed to using AI. Thus, 39 percent were at least partially processed with AI.
The result shocked the lecturer, and he reported receiving some emails after the experiment, in which students apologized to him. But some also tried to convince him of their innocence. He said, “The Trojan horse does not lie.”
Whether the assignments that were written with the help of AI were qualitatively better is not clear from the post. It is also questionable whether using AI makes us more productive. A study on this is supposed to provide initial answers, you can read more about it on MeinMMO.
Students at German universities regularly use AI tools
How do students in Germany use AI? The CHE or Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung reports that a majority of students in Germany supposedly use AI in their studies. Tools like ChatGPT are particularly popular, primarily used for general research.
According to the center, in addition to research, AI is also popular as a brainstorming tool among students. The use of text generation for homework, as identified by the history professor, is said to be less popular.
Artificial intelligence has entered the everyday lives of many people, and its wide availability makes it easy to use. Therefore, it is not surprising that students are using it. However, it is unexpected that the roles at the university can also be reversed: A student demanded 7,000 euros from her university because she caught her lecturer using AI.
