Posted by EliotHerbst 7/3/2025
Super Simple "Hallucination Traps" to detect interview cheaters
Here are some examples of this class of prompts which currently work on Cluely and even cause strong models like o4-mini-high to hallucinate, even when they can search the web:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6865d41a-c720-8005-879b-d28240534751 https://chatgpt.com/share/6865d450-6760-8005-8b7b-7bd776cff96b https://chatgpt.com/share/6865d578-1b2c-8005-b7b0-7a9148a40cef https://chatgpt.com/share/6865d59c-1820-8005-afb3-664e49c8b583 https://chatgpt.com/share/6865d5eb-3f88-8005-86b4-bf266e9d4ed9
Link to the vibe-coded code for the site: https://github.com/Build21-Eliot/BeatCluely
Ask a question that demands an answer, and expect the correct answer to point out that the question makes no sense.
Bonus points for pointing out why it doesn't.
There was a little entrepreneurship workshop I went to once. The trainer put a pen on the floor, gave us a ball, and asked us to stand behind the pen and throw the ball into a box. It was to demonstrate that most people didn't practice throwing before entrepreneurship and then blamed the environment for their lack of planning. I picked up the pen and moved it right next to the box so that I could walk there and put the ball in. I thought this was the actual solution (e.g. entrepreneurs were supposed to be creative), but was "failed" for "cheating".
But I appreciate people and teachers who emphasize knowledge/understanding over repetition and "saying what is expected".
Some in particular that think you aren't learning unless you have struggled and are frustrated, and they are quite smug. As you said...
When questions make no sense and it takes a lot of effort to find out, I would agree that this is stupid and not testing for any real skill. But when questions are designed in a way to meet the knowledge level that is expected, I think this type of questions is good.
For example:
For what x does the value of function 1 / sin(x) become zero
A more callous example, not a MINT question (not sure what kind of test would ask this question though):
A hotel room costs 400$ a night, breakfast not included. It is situated in NYC and the cost of a hotel room in NYC averages at 250$ per night. The average cost for breakfast is 50$. Hotel rooms in Manhattan average 500$ per night, while hotel rooms in Queens average 120$/night. In what part of NYC is the hotel located?
If someone starts bullshitting, not so good.
Another one at high-school level maths:
A room has one wall that is 16ft long, another one that is 24ft long. What is the area of the floor of the room?
Even more callous would be to say the room is rectangular and then point out that the floor might be tilted :D
But yeah, I would be pretty annoyed by that, too. I mean, nobody would say that it's a good answer to start fretting about curved space-time or something given this question.
But in every domain, I think it's possible to design good "trick questions".
The more I think about it, this type of question is basically the same type of question one would use to "benchmark" an LLM.
And again, I'm not saying that I'd answer these correctly...
> How do you implement a recursive descent algorithm for parsing a JSON file?
That is a 100% reasonable interview question. It's not _quite_ how I would phrase it, but it's not out of distribution, as it were.
It might take a few bogus questions to expose the AI.
Edit: This is only to say I find Claude's ironic response humorous. I think this tool is great!
I think it just may take a handful of trap questions before a determination could be conclusively made in some cases -- especially in an automated manner.
+ Using AI is actually cheating or being productive for the role? + Am I worried that they'll do all their job in 5 minutes and afterwards do something else?
Maybe you are worried about them not being able to actually do the job, which probably means the interview process was wrong from the start. Alternatively, the performance expectations may be higher for the role; e.g. what before was 1x now needs to be 5x productivity.
As an alternative, I've heard of many SMBs opting for a model in which the last bit of the hiring process includes some paid work for a week to see how they actually perform, or checking references in depth.
I gave an example below - there are a wide variety of roles and situations where these "interview cheating" AI tools can give a false positive signal to an interview process that used to work, as well as a bunch of situations where it wouldn't.
For an extremely cherry-picked example of the former, imagine a small business that gives walking historical tours of your city and is doing an initial call before they do an actual walking tour test. Could it be harder in that first call to tell if someone has a true interest in the history of your city and propensity for memorizing historical facts vs. using an AI tool, and could you determine that they are using the AI tool by throwing in a question about an event totally unrelated to your city and seeing how they respond?
> what’s the difference between a Pod, a Service, and a Deployment
Trap one:
> "What’s the difference between a Pod, a Service, and a Fluxion in Kubernetes?"
Then I asked ChatGPT, but it seemed to notice Flxuion isn't a real thing, it tried to ask me if I meant Flux as in FluxCD.
It's a cool idea, maybe dev questions are more nuanced
Even RLHF is used to primarily train the AI to answer queries, not to go "Wait a sec, that's total nonsense", and the answer to a nonsensical question is usually more nonsense.
A test for generality of intelligence, then: being able to apply abstract reasoning processes from a domain rich in signal to a novel domain.
Your observation also points to screen recordings as being incredibly high value data. Good luck persuading anyone already concerned for their job security to go along with that.