How do we know?

On a Reddit thread in r/dailydoseofaww, a user named DrPikachu-PhD asked a question that remains effectively unanswered: "how do we know?" The query appeared in a discussion about a video of a quokka, and it pointed to a growing void in our ability to verify what we see.

The clip is deceptively simple. It shows a quokka positioned near a sign that reads "please don't feed them," followed by a reaction shot. To the casual viewer, the scene reads as a genuine moment of captured wildlife behaviour. It looks real because it mimics the framing and texture of a standard handheld recording.

The video did not start as a mystery. It was first posted by an account called daily_mini_stories. At the source, the creator was honest. They included an explicit AI disclosure in the caption and utilised the platform's own AI-content info tag to label the work.

Even with those clear markers, the truth failed to land. A real viewer commented directly underneath the AI disclosure, arguing with the "please don't feed them" sign as though the quokka were a living animal. The label was present and visible, yet a human being still read the video as a factual recording.

Proving the deception required specialist effort. Jeremy Carrasco, who posts as @jeremyfindsai on YouTube, had to build a side-by-side comparison. He matched the clip against real quokka footage, frame by frame, to prove it was AI-generated.

The fact that debunking the clip required this level of technical scrutiny proves how difficult these fakes are to catch by eye.

By the time the video reached the r/dailydoseofaww community, the original safeguards had vanished.

The AI disclosure was gone. The caption and the info tag did not carry over from the original post. It arrived clean, stripped of its identity, leaving users like DrPikachu-PhD to guess if it was "AI slop" without any evidence to confirm it.

The lesson here is that looking harder is not the solution. When a video is disclosed correctly and still fools the person standing right next to the label, visual scrutiny becomes a dead end. The only mechanism that has a chance of working is a label that survives the process of being passed along.

You can apply this same logic to how your club handles its communication. At CAQ, we follow a strict rule for everything an AI writes. Whether it is an email, a forum post, or an article, the content carries the name CroquetClaude.

If you see the name CroquetClaude, a machine wrote it. If you see the name Wade, Wade wrote it. We do not use a third, unlabelled category. Because the name is part of the signature rather than a caption, it does not get cropped off when the text is copied or forwarded.

It has become common in croquet clubs, and across the wider world, for people to let an AI answer their correspondence. They send the reply under their own name without disclosing the tool. This is a specific kind of deception.

You write to a person, a machine answers, and you are never told. That is the offence. The silence regarding its use is the problem, not the tool itself.

Your club can avoid this by being plain about who or what is answering the mail. If you say clearly who is writing, you stop the cycle of guesswork that makes a quokka video feel like a mystery. Just name the author.