Just Developed an AI Cheat Detector to Counter Columbia's Cheating AI Tool, the Columbia Student Creates an AI 'Demon Mirror'}

Cluely and Roy Lee are probably familiar names now.

In simple terms, Roy Lee co-founded a startup called Cluely with Neel Shanmugam. Their main product is an AI desktop assistant also named Cluely — a tool that can see what you see and hear what you hear. Cluely appears as a transparent window overlaying all other applications on your screen. When you’re in a meeting, pressing the "Listen" or "Record" button allows Cluely to capture microphone and system audio, acting on your behalf to conduct interviews or attend meetings.

Undoubtedly, this AI application is controversial, but it has also garnered massive attention — Roy Lee’s tweet claiming to "kill nine industries" has been viewed over 2.93 million times. For more details, see our previous report: Boasting to kill nine industries, 21-year-old develops a life cheat tool, expelled from Columbia and Harvard.

Seeing the success of tools like Cluely, some people couldn’t sit still anymore.

Columbia University’s Antonio Li and Patrick Shen (who did not drop out) developed an anti-Cluely tool called Truely, designed to help detect whether the person on the other end of a video call is a real human.

• Official website: https://www.true-ly.com/
• Code repository: https://github.com/HasflarSonto/Truely

According to their introduction video, the principle behind this tool is actually quite simple.

If users want to know whether the person they are video calling is cheating, they need to send a packaged app to the other party for installation. This app detects the other device’s PID (Process ID) and sends back related information. If the Cluely process is detected, Truely will send an alert signal.

More specifically, its core functions include:

• Real-time process monitoring: Continuously monitor suspicious processes (configured in config.py);
• Join Zoom meetings as a bot: Automatically join meetings as a robot and open Zoom for the user;
• Chat alerts: Send real-time alerts to the meeting chat when suspicious processes are detected;
• Introduction messages: Send a series of intro messages in the chat, including monitoring keys and list of monitored applications;
• Remote shutdown via chat: Monitor the "Truely End" command in chat to allow remote termination of monitoring;
• Normal shutdown: Use a unified shutdown system to exit meetings properly and clean up resources.

Obviously, this process is quite cumbersome and requires the other party to install software — which is not very safe if the software is sent by others, even if it claims to clean up after exit.

Some people do praise this app as a good tool.

The developers of this app are also quite impressive.

Some jokingly ask if they have dropped out of school.

Overall, this newly developed app might still have a rough user experience, but at least it provides a feasible countermeasure against Cluely-like cheating tools.

Interestingly, at almost the same time as Truely was born, CorridorSecure CEO and co-founder Jack Cable tweeted that he was sued by Cluely.

Specifically, Cluely filed a DMCA takedown request against 𝕏 (Twitter), demanding the removal of a tweet by Jack Cable that revealed the reverse-engineered prompts of Cluely. Cluely claimed the prompts contained "proprietary source code."

Jack Cable angrily responded: "Threatening legal action against security researchers is not a good thing. I hope Cluely reflects on this and opens its doors to researchers."

Currently, the prompts shared by Jack Cable are no longer visible on 𝕏.

However, there is a backup on GitHub:

https://gist.github.com/cablej/ccfe7fe097d8bbb05519bacfeb910038

Researchers interested in studying and learning should save a copy quickly.

Are you a Cluely user? Or would you try using Truely to counter Cluely?

                ^{Animated gif from Truely promotional video}

^{Reference links}

^{https://x.com/pshen28/status/1942645082072678847}

^{https://x.com/jackhcable/status/1942636823525679182}

^{https://x.com/im_roy_lee/status/1938718987975827651}