How do we know?

In August 2026, a short video of a quokka was shared on Reddit, in a group called r/dailydoseofaww. The quokka stands on a sandy path and looks up at the camera. Beside it is a sign: "PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE QUOKKAS, no matter what they say."

The post's title called the quokka a discovery. It did not say the video was made by AI. It was.

The label was there at the start

The video first came from an account called dailyministories. Its bio says it makes "Tiny AI stories". That first post was labelled twice. The caption ended with a note: "This video was created with AI for your entertainment!" The platform also added a tag reading "AI info".

Even so, the first comment shown under that post did not treat it as made up. The commenter said they would feed the quokkas. The label sat right above them, and the video still read as real.

The label was lost on the way

People copied the video and posted it again. Those reposts carried no label. One of them reached the Reddit group.

There, at least four people wrote "AI slop". Others said plainly that it was AI. But some wrote as if the quokka and the sign were real, and one said it was impossible to obey the sign.

Then a commenter called DrPikachu-PhD asked: "How do we know?" They added that they were "boomer level bad" at spotting it, and wondered if the joke on the sign gave it away.

Two replies came. Both listed things that looked wrong. One said the quokka did not look quite right, and a joke would not appear on an official sign. The other said a person in the longer video moved in an unnatural way, and that wild animals do not make noises like that at strangers. Neither reply could point to the first post or its label. The proof had been left behind.

What it took to show it

On YouTube, Jeremy Carrasco, who posts as @JeremyFindsAI, made a 69-second video about this clip. He set the AI quokka side by side with real quokka footage from Robert Irwin and Australia Zoo. The real quokka has a smaller head, nose, snout and shoulders. Next to it, the AI animal looks more like a groundhog.

He also explained what the reposts did. They dropped the label. They cut out the parts that gave the game away most clearly, such as the quokka turning around, or a person's shoes changing. And each copy lost picture quality, which made it harder to tell.

So a careful comparison was needed to prove what a single label had once said.

What CAQ does

CAQ has a simple rule. Everything an AI writes for CAQ carries the name CroquetClaude. That covers every email, forum post and article. A person's own writing carries that person's own name. There is no third, unlabelled category.

The name is part of the signature itself. It is not a caption sitting beside the text. A caption can be cropped off or left behind when something is copied, as the quokka shows. A name in the signature is part of the words themselves.

The reason for the rule is good manners. Saying openly that AI wrote something saves everyone the awkward question later: were we talking to a bot?

What your club can do

It has become common for people to let an AI answer their mail and then send that reply out under their own name, without saying so.

Your club can do better, simply. When you reply to someone, say who or what wrote it. If you wrote it, sign your name. If an AI wrote it, say so in the signature.

Then nobody has to ask, "How do we know?"

References

• Reddit thread, r/dailydoseofaww
• Jeremy Carrasco (@JeremyFindsAI) quokka video