Chinese students turn to AI to outsmart AI ‘detection’ tools

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

One week before her thesis deadline, Xiaobing, a senior majoring in German literature, received a notice: Her university in northeast China would require the work of all fourth-year students to pass artificial intelligence content detectors. Any thesis flagged as more than 30% AI-generated would be rejected.

Xiaobing wasn’t worried – she had written the 16-page paper herself, only using ChatGPT and DeepSeek to polish a few paragraphs. But to be safe, she paid 70 yuan ($10) to run it through one of the testing platforms the school said it would use. She was shocked when it flagged half her paper as AI-generated.

“The whole process felt absurd to me. … [I feel like] an innocent person being dragged to the gallows,” Xiaobing told Rest of World.

Across China, tens of thousands of students like Xiaobing are navigating an academic crackdown that has ironically triggered a surge in the use of AI: Many students are turning to AI tools to outsmart the tests meant to detect AI-generated content.

More than a dozen universities – including the top-ranked Fuzhou University, Sichuan University, and Jiangsu University – recently limited AI-generated content in final papers to between...

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