College prof hides prompt to catch AI cheaters, finds human nature is pretty much as we thought
A college professor who was tired of reading AI responses to essay questions. found a unique way to determine if his students were cheating. Sadly but not surprisingly,I'll of the 35 students who took the test fell right into his trap.Jason Gibson, who teaches history and African American studies at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, came up with a rather basic way to trick his students into handing in AI slop. In an essay prompt for a question about the industrial revolution, he buried a chunk of white text that students wouldn’t spot, but that an AI model would see if the prompt was copied and pasted into a chatbot.
- ▪A college professor who was tired of reading AI responses to essay questions. found a unique way to determine if his students were cheating.
- ▪Sadly but not surprisingly,I'll of the 35 students who took the test fell right into his trap.Jason Gibson, who teaches history and African American studies at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, came up with a rather basic way to trick
- ▪In an essay prompt for a question about the industrial revolution, he buried a chunk of white text that students wouldn’t spot, but that an AI model would see if the prompt was copied and pasted into a chatbot.
The Register publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under tech. We currently carry 323 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | theregister |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/28/college-prof-hides-prompt-to-catch-ai-cheaters-finds-human-nature-is-pretty-much-as-we-thought/5279864 |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Jul 2026 18:20:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-28T16:25:32.703Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-28T16:25:32.703Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | LLDDHNx8zoR7 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); ai and ml College prof hides prompt to catch AI cheaters, finds human nature is pretty much as we thought Brandon Vigliarolo Brandon Vigliarolo GOVERNMENT AND IT NEWS REPORTER Published tue 28 Jul 2026 // 17:20 UTC Busted! A college professor who was tired of reading AI responses to essay questions. found a unique way to determine if his students were cheating.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at theregister.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from theregister
