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Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037

High quality anecdata are exactly the reason why I love HN. Thanks for posting about it.

    > fake AI accounts

First, how do you identify them? Is it strictly admins monitoring posts/server-side logs or do users report odd behaviour?

Second, what is the purpose of these accounts? Are they basically running submarine adverts, or are they just trolling (to harm the community)?

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A starting point for study;

AI Deception: A Survey of Examples, Risks, and Potential Solutions - https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.14752

Deception Analysis with Artificial Intelligence: An Interdisciplinary Perspective - https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05724

Some background (pre-AI) ;

Online Deception in Social Media - https://cacm.acm.org/research/online-deception-in-social-med...

Eagerness.. you let them work through a endless labyrinth of forms. While the human drops out after the 2nd form- the ai is willing to go all the way always.

Don't you lose really users by making it easy for bots to complete a sign up, but hard for humans?

Maybe 5 required fields and 30 optional fields. Apart from "census dweebs" [1] I don't know of many people that fill in more than the required.

[1]: https://thebeaverton.com/2026/05/local-nerd-disappointed-he-...

I'm not familiar with the specific example, but as a first hunch, if I had to implement such a system, it'd be part of the flow after the successful signup, not during.

You could also pretend to pass-through and watch the behavior of the "user" after success.

We review all signups and their submitted content, and we have a fake account type "AI creator" which we record, so if they tried that first, it's a clue.

We also integrate a third-party AI detection tool that checks their uploaded content before they get access to the community, and we use a second third-party tool as a double-check, and if we still doubt ourselves, we'll ask for their workings-outs in some way that is relevant to their creative type.

We also ask them to prove they are the author of their work through various time-tested mechanisms.

I have no idea why people do the things they do. People are a mystery to me.

    > we have a fake account type "AI creator" which we record

This is genius! The LLM is so dumb that it falls for the honeypot.

    > We also ask them to prove they are the author of their work through various time-tested mechanisms.

I would love to know more details, but it is not a good idea to share on a public platform. That said, if it is working for you, then hats off: You have found/developed a effective "defense in layers" strategy.

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