This viral AI pen didn’t help me cheat

A college student recently told me about the latest technology designed to help students cheat, and it wasn’t ChatGPT. It was a physical instrument marketed in YouTube ads as an alternative to printed physical tests, which is back in vogue now that artificial intelligence is tearing apart higher education like a hurricane. (One example of this is artificial intelligence agents, which are… Unstoppable cheating machines for online assignments.)

But if questions printed on physical papers seem like the eye of the calm storm, think again, because where there’s a will, there’s a way—or a tool. In this case, a small wand-like device that looks like a TV remote with a screen and some buttons on the side.

In practice, the tool is a text scanner. It “reads” the letters on the page using a small camera positioned between two protruding slits at one end, which turns on a light when pressed on the page. The computer on the device processes the words and uses artificial intelligence or perhaps the Internet to get an answer.

YouTube Shorts displays devices with names like “AI Smart Pen” or “ChatGPT pen” She appeared in the video feeds of college students. These point-of-view style videos show “students” pulling the “pen” out of their pockets and passing it during exams on a classroom desk. The videos have hundreds of thousands of views. “I needed to go back to high school,” the text reads across One video View the AI ​​pen tool that scans a question asking the name of the first President of the United States. (Answer: George Washington, according to #ai #pen #gadget.)

This is how the ads appear: One swipe of the tool across a question on a printed quiz results in an answer to said question.

So, I tried out one of the 90 or so devices called some version of the “AI Scanner Pen” on Amazon — the “Scan Sense Pen, Ai Smart Scanner Pen” for $68.99. It promised me instant AI answers to math, history, and more, plus offline translation in over 60 languages, a camera, Bluetooth connectivity, and access to music and file storage. I got it in black.

I also found that it doesn’t work.

It lit up and illuminated the page of various test preparation textbooks that I had checked out from the public library. The camera detected words correctly, sometimes, as it moved across the question.

But the answers you gave me were nonsense. I tried it on questions about algebra, science, and history, and none of the answers made any sense.

At first, I wondered if I hadn’t selected the correct setting. The menu for the pen we purchased was in Chinese, which made it difficult for me to navigate the home screen. I’ve inserted screenshots into language translation apps to see what each button does. One was to translate the language, another to help with writing articles, and more to help with vocabulary or audio recording.

The setup I wanted, and which I was already testing, is called “Questions and Answers” ​​and is intended to answer scanned questions. Even when the device successfully scans words, which it doesn’t often, it will provide laughably inaccurate options.

For example, when I surveyed the question “What layer lies directly beneath the Earth’s crust?”, he told me that “there are more than five hundred known active volcanoes in the world and thousands of dormant volcanoes.” (answer: cloak. Fact check: The number of “active” volcanoes depends on the time frame, according to the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program. there 525 volcanoes With confirmed eruptions since 1800.)

The other problem was its size. It’s so huge that it doesn’t attract attention. Imagine a quiet classroom, with students sitting at their desks a few feet apart, and the teacher looking across the room from his or her desk in the front. Surely nearby peers or an invigilator observing classes would notice a 6 x 1.25-inch wand lighting up a student’s exam paper?

Although it fails as an answering device, this device could theoretically help translate text between languages. You’ve found six languages: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Traditional Chinese, or English. A quick test of switching from English to Chinese, and back to English via the translation app seemed successful.

College students have told me about a much simpler and cheaper way to cheat on printed exams: Take a photo of the exam question on your phone and upload it to ChatGPT. They assured me that this was relatively easy to do in large lecture halls, even with an observer walking around the room. Students told me they see their peers doing this at the beginning of the test. Later, these colleagues steal a glance at their phones under the desk once ChatGPT has processed the answer. Or they look during a bathroom break in the middle of a test.

That’s it, cheating has never been easier, but maybe not with this device.