This viral AI pen didn’t help me cheat

A college student recently told me about the latest tech designed to help students cheat — and it wasn’t ChatGPT. It was an actual, physical gadget marketed in YouTube ads as the workaround to physical, hardcopy tests, which are back in vogue now as AI tears through higher education like a tornado. (One example is AI agents, which are unstoppable cheating machines for online assignments.)

But if questions printed on physical sheets of paper seem like the calm eye of the storm, think again, because when there’s a will, there’s a way — or a gadget. 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 gadget is a text scanner. It “reads” the letters on the page using a small camera tucked between two prongs protruding at one end, which turn on a light when depressed against a page. The on-device computer processes the words and uses AI or maybe the internet to churn out an answer.

YouTube Shorts featuring devices with names like “AI Smart Pen” or “ChatGPT pen” have been popping up on college students’ video feeds. These POV-style videos show “students” pulling the “pen” out of their pocket and running it over the exams on the classroom desk. The videos have hundreds of thousands of views. “I needed ts back in high school,” reads the text across one video showing an #ai #pen #gadget that scans a question asking for the name of the first president of the United States. (Answer: George Washington, according to the #ai #pen #gadget.)

That is how the ads make it look: One swipe of the gadget across a question on a printed test results in an answer to said question.

So, I tried out one of the 90 or so devices called some version of “AI scanner pen” on Amazon — a “Scan Sense Pen, Ai Smart Scanner Pen” for $68.99. It promised me “Instant Ai Answers for Math, History & More” in addition to offline translation of over 60 languages, a camera, Bluetooth connection, and access to music and file storage. I got it in black.

I also found that it does not work.

It turned on and illuminated the page of various test preparation study books that I checked out from the public library. The camera correctly detected words, some of the time, as it moved across a question.

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

At first, I wondered if I hadn’t selected the correct setting. The menu of the pen we bought was in Chinese, which made it tricky for me to navigate the homescreen. I fed pictures of the screen into language translation apps to figure out what each button did. One was for language translation, another for essay help, and still more for vocabulary help or voice recording.

The setting that I wanted, and the one I was already testing, is called Q&A and meant to answer scanned questions. Even when the device successfully scanned the words, which was not often, it would offer hilariously inaccurate options.

For example, when I scanned the question “What is the layer that is located immediately beneath the Earth’s crust?”, it told me that “there are over five hundred known active volcanoes in the world and thousands of extinct volcanoes.” (Answer: mantle. Fact check: The number of “active” volcanoes depends on the time frame, according to the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program. There are 525 volcanoes with confirmed eruptions since the year 1800.)

The other problem was its size. It’s far too bulky to not attract attention. Picture a quiet classroom, students sat at desks a few feet apart, the teacher peering out across the room from their desk at the front. Surely nearby peers or a proctor pacing the rows would notice a 6-by-1.25-inch wand lighting up a student’s exam paper?

While it failed as an answer machine, this device could theoretically help translate text between languages. I found six languages: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Traditional Chinese, or English. A quick test from English to Chinese, and back to English via a translation app, appeared successful.

College students told me of a far simpler and cheaper way to cheat on hard-copy tests: Snap a picture of the exam question on your phone and upload it to ChatGPT. This, they assured me, is relatively easy to do in large lecture halls, even with a proctor pacing around the room. The students told me they see their peers do this at the start of an exam. Later, those peers steal quick glances at their phone under the desk once ChatGPT has processed the answer. Or they look during a mid-test bathroom break.

That is all to say: Cheating has never been easier, just maybe not with this device.