I fed a bestseller and my own AI-written novels to the same detector

At ten in the morning I pasted the first 1,200 characters of chapter 70 of Xuanjian Xianzu into Tencent Zhuque.

The book sits at #1 on Qidian’s bestseller chart. Its author, Ji Yueren, is past sixteen hundred chapters.

The machine’s verdict: strong signs of human authorship.

Then I swapped in a second passage — the best-performing book on my own author account. 1.03 million characters, 1,078 active readers, rated 8.5 on Fanqie.

This time: no clear signs of human authorship.

That book was written by AI.

The samples: three of mine, one bestseller

I have 31 contracted books on Fanqie, 27.4 million characters in total. All of them were written by AI, using more than one model.

Three went into this test, with 1,078, 155 and 11 active readers. Same rule for all three: take a chapter from the middle of the book, cut the first 1,200 characters of prose, change nothing. Not chapter one — opening chapters get reworked over and over and don’t represent what a book normally looks like.

The outside control is a single book: chapter 70 of Xuanjian Xianzu, still free to read on Qidian. The reason for picking it is simple. It is #1 on the bestseller chart, and I didn’t write it.

Two detectors, both free:

• Tencent Zhuque (matrix.tencent.com/ai-detect). The page lists a model update date of 21 July 2026. Five checks a day logged out, twenty logged in.
• ZeroGPT (zerogpt.com). An English-language tool, 15,000 characters free, no login.

What Zhuque said

Four passages, four calls in the right direction.

Martial Reckoning is the odd one out. It came back as “weak signs of human authorship” rather than “no clear signs” — Zhuque’s wording has gradations, and on that passage it was less certain. The book it hesitated over has 11 readers.

On the book with 1,078 readers it did not hesitate at all.

Across these four passages, reader count and “reads like a human wrote it” have nothing to do with each other. The best-selling AI book in the set is also the one the machine called fastest.

ZeroGPT labelled the bestseller AI-generated too

Same two passages, pasted into ZeroGPT.

For Xuanjian Xianzu: Your Text is Most Likely AI/GPT generated.

For mine: Your Text is Most Likely AI/GPT generated.

The same sentence both times. And both times the percentage read 0% — “most likely AI generated” on one line, zero percent on the next.

It isn’t computing anything. Chinese goes in, a default verdict comes out.

When a school or a platform tells you to “run it through an AI checker”, this part is worth having: an English detector’s verdict on Chinese text is unusable, and it won’t even hide its own contradiction.

Zhuque froze after the fourth sample

Nine passages were queued; four got through.

The page would stick on “detecting” and stay there. A refresh didn’t clear it; only a fresh tab did. Slowing down to one submission every thirty seconds didn’t help either. The quota wasn’t the problem — a dozen checks were still unused. The page was.

All 31 books are still up on Fanqie

The longest one runs 1.66 million characters and has zero active readers.

The one with 1,078 readers and an 8.5 rating got rated, got followed, got read. Tencent Zhuque needed 1,200 characters.

“Nobody checked” and “it can’t be detected” are two different things. I only separated them today.