AI in Education: Spot the hidden font edition

The outcome was never really in doubt.

A professor at Alcorn State emailed the questions for his History mid-term to his 35 students. Just below the question, he wrote an instruction that asked the student to write something crazy about Madagascar.

Except he wrote it in white font. Students didn’t see it – but the AI engine that 32 of his 35 students used to cheat on the test did. 32 of the 35 students in the class copied the questions from the emailed test (including the part in the white font), pasted it into their AI engine of choice, then copied and pasted the results into the test.

The students didn’t even bother to proofread the AI-generated response, because if they had, they would have noticed some pretty bizarre pronouncements about Madagascar (example: “Madagascar floats sideways through the afternoon.”). Didn’t have much to do with the actual questions about the Industrial Revolution.

How do you put this genie back in the bottle? And how do you convince an entire generation of students that industrial-scale cheating is not ok? Learning how to type CTRL-C and CTRL-V is not education. If that’s the only skill they bring to their post-graduation employer, they’re not going to have a post-graduation employer very long.