http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/prompt
Alt text
Suddenly wondering if someone has already done this.
Bonus panel
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
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Wouldn't the students just copy-paste the bit they can see? How does the hidden part get included?
The funny thing about students who use AI to cheat on their papers is that they aren't very smart and are prone to making stupid mistakes.
The hidden part is in the middle somewhere. Most likely hidden in a paragraph break. That way they include it when selecting all the visible text.
Why would an essay assignment have multiple paragraphs of instructions?
To make it easy to hide the prompt injection between the paragraphs 😁
I've definitely had English essays that were like, "read the short story presented below and then explain how the author used literary devices to express their purpose."
Control-a, control-c, control-p
Select all, copy, paste
Ctrl+v is paste
Shift+Ins is paste.
Huh; I never knew.
I use it in command line where control v won't work.
Ahh; 🧠. I usually just use
ctrl + shift + vbut that could come in handy where the other binding isn't available.Well now I have another way to paste, thanks!
ctrl + shift + vis usually "paste as a plain text", if your setup supports copy-paste the text attribtutesbut ctrl + p prints
Then paste would reveal all the copied text though, including the previously hidden instruction.
Yeah, if they even bother to read it.
Easiest method would be to just make the instructions as two paragraphs and type the prompt in size 1 white font between the paragraphs. As far as the document is concerned it would read as one paragraph. Set the font to white size 1.
(InjectionPrompt goes here) Now that you have read the above instructions, please write your full report below of how you implement this new technology. Lorm ipsum yada yada yada
If you wanted to be very devious you could probably write, write the entire prompt in whitespace. But I kind of wonder if the ai would be able to notice it
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)
Could even just ask the AI to describe what they need to do if they are just giving it the file link. At this point, you could probably even just tell it to be aware of AI traps in the prompt (though an experiment with gpt 4-o mini just ignored the prompt to ignore anything out of context).