  Recent applications of LLMs in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) systems
have shown impressive results, but the use of shortcuts, mechanisms triggered
by features spuriously correlated to the true label, has emerged as a potential
threat to their reliability. We analyze the problem from two angles: LLMs as
editors, guided to edit text to mislead LLMs; and LLMs as readers, who answer
questions based on the edited text. We introduce a framework that guides an
editor to add potential shortcuts-triggers to samples. Using GPT4 as the
editor, we find it can successfully edit trigger shortcut in samples that fool
LLMs. Analysing LLMs as readers, we observe that even capable LLMs can be
deceived using shortcut knowledge. Strikingly, we discover that GPT4 can be
deceived by its own edits (15% drop in F1). Our findings highlight inherent
vulnerabilities of LLMs to shortcut manipulations. We publish ShortcutQA, a
curated dataset generated by our framework for future research.
