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 ...