In China, AI chatbots turned off photo recognition during the local ZNO - "gaokao" exam
Kyiv • UNN
Leading AI chatbots in China have temporarily disabled image recognition during the national "gaokao" exam. This was done to prevent cheating by applicants.
In China, during the national "gaokao" exam – the equivalent of the Ukrainian EIT/NMT – leading AI chatbots, including those from Alibaba and Tencent, temporarily disabled image recognition functions.
This is reported by UNN with reference to Bloomberg and The Guardian.
Details
During the exams, in which more than 13 million Chinese applicants participate, students tried to use AI tools for voluminous answers.
To prevent fraud, Alibaba, Tencent, Moonshot and ByteDance suspended the photo recognition function in their chatbots. One of the students uploaded a photo of the test task to the Doubao bot (owned by ByteDance), but received a message:
During the exam to obtain a higher education diploma, according to the requirements, the answer service is temporarily suspended
The same answer appeared when a student turned to Alibaba's Qwen chatbot in an attempt to explain that "this is not an exam", and other services, such as DeepSeek, Yuanbao and Kimi, lost the ability to upload images.
One of the explanations of the chatbots sounded like this:
In order to ensure the fairness of the entrance exams, this function cannot be used during the period of their conduct
The corresponding restriction will last from June 7 to 10, when the exam is held.
Additionally
In addition, to ensure the fairness of "gaokao", local authorities apply:
- AI monitoring to track atypical actions (whispering, repeated glances at a neighbor);
- biometric recognition, equipment verification and radio jamming in the premises;
- adjustment of city schedules, in particular, delaying the start of work of offices, canceling events and allocating special lanes — all to minimize risk and improve logistics for more than 13 million applicants.
Reference
The "gaokao" exam is the most jealous entrance exam in China, key to entering universities, especially for children from low-income families. Its results can determine the fate of a teenager.