China Froze AI Tools Nationwide to Prevent Cheating in College Exams

Here in the States, we constantly hear about students freaking out about the SATs or the LSAT’s or whatever other standardized test people have to take to reach some new upper echelon of their educational or professional careers. China has something similar. It’s called the gaokao.

It’s an intense multi-day set of exams taken by somewhere around 13 million prospective college students. For nine hours, spread across three days, high school students take a test that will determine the fate of the rest of their lives.

Obviously, with so much on the line, the urge to cheat is hard to ignore. To prevent that from happening, and to ensure that these kids are being tested on their merit and not what an AI chatbot told them, China took a bold and hilarious step.

They basically just unplugged the entire nation’s access to AI for the duration of the testing period, reports Bloomberg.

AI Tools Make It Too Easy to Cheat on Exams, So China Froze Them

Chinese AI companies like Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, and Moonshot have essentially hit the kill switch on their chatbots’ most useful features for cheating on exams, like photo recognition that can identify and solve exam questions.

That feature, in particular, has been blocked during test hours. If a student tries to upload a pic of a tricky math problem, they’re going to be met with a message telling them that such action is not in compliance with the rules. Though they’ll probably go back into effect once the testing period is over.

The move has been quietly universal, without a single public announcement from any of the companies involved. As you can imagine, students who have quickly grown to rely on AI have been driven into a panic on social media as the digital floaties that kept their educational careers from drowning have suddenly been deflated. They’re all on their own with nothing but the brains they forgot to fill with knowledge.

The grand irony of all of this is that, according to China Daily, students are barred from using AI services to cheat on exams, but administrators of the test can use AI surveillance systems to make sure students aren’t using AI on the tests. AI for me, but not for thee.