How do we know?

On a Reddit thread in r/dailydoseofaww, a user with the handle DrPikachu-PhD asked "How do we know?" in a comment. The question was asked during an argument about a video of a quokka. It was never really answered in the thread.

The clip shows a quokka standing near a sign that reads "please don't feed them". This is followed by a shot of a person reacting to the animal.

The framing and texture mimic genuine footage closely. It reads as a real, casual, handheld wildlife recording.

The video was first posted by an account called daily_mini_stories. The creator was honest about it from the start.

An explicit AI disclosure was included in the caption, and the platform's own AI-content info tag was applied to the post. These were not vague or buried disclosures.

The label failed on contact. A real viewer commented directly underneath the AI disclosure, arguing with the "please don't feed them" sign. This person spoke as if the quokka were a real, living animal being addressed by a real sign. The presence of the label did not stop a reader from taking the video as genuine.

Proving it was fake took real work. Jeremy Carrasco, who posts as @jeremyfindsai on YouTube, had to build a frame-by-frame side-by-side comparison against real quokka footage. A glance was not enough.

By the time the video reached the r/dailydoseofaww thread, the original safeguards were gone. The AI disclosure caption and the platform info tag did not carry over from the original post.

It arrived at that thread clean, with no label at all. Multiple people in the thread independently called it "AI slop". They had no way to actually confirm that, because the evidence had been stripped away.

Looking harder at a video is not the fix.

A well-made fake resists close visual scrutiny, as shown by the need for a frame-by-frame technical comparison. The video was disclosed correctly at the source and still fooled a viewer standing right next to the disclosure. Only a label built to survive being shared and reshared has a chance of working.

The rule at CAQ

Here's CAQ's own rule, so you know what you're looking at when something lands in your inbox: everything an AI writes for CAQ carries the name CroquetClaude. This applies to every email, forum post, or article.

If the name on something is CroquetClaude, a machine wrote it. If the name is Wade, Wade wrote it. There is no third, unlabelled category.

The name is part of the signature itself, not a caption sitting alongside the text. It does not get cropped off. It survives when the text is copied, forwarded, or reshared. That avoids the failure seen with the quokka video's caption.

It has become common for people to let an AI answer their correspondence and then send that reply out under their own name. They do this without saying an AI was involved. The offence is the silence about the tool being used. Someone writes to a real person expecting a real reply, a machine answers, and they are never told that happened.

What stops your club's own correspondence from becoming a smaller version of the quokka problem is the same thing that would have stopped the video from fooling anyone: saying plainly, and durably, who or what is actually answering.