Is This AI? Longitudinal Analysis of Strategies Used for AI Detection on Two Subreddits
Source record
yeung-2026-isthisai-strategies· 2026 · Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES)
Evidence tier: B (peer-reviewed-conference) · Verification: verified-abstract (compiler confidence: medium)
Bottom line: Catalogued 12 strategies people use in the wild to judge whether content is AI-generated (e.g., close inspection of physical details, recognising AI content trends, assumptions about model capabilities) and showed that strategies shift over time with AI capabilities and online trends.
Citation
Christina Yeung, Galen Weld, Jaron Mink, Franziska Roesner (2026). Is This AI? Longitudinal Analysis of Strategies Used for AI Detection on Two Subreddits. Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES), 9(4), 2800-2812. https://doi.org/10.1609/aies.v9i4.43351
Verification entry (identifiers, resolvers, claims with source locations): /data/citations.json#yeung-2026-isthisai-strategies
Study design
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Design | Mixed-methods longitudinal content analysis of crowd AI-detection discussions on r/isthisAI and r/RealOrAI over 2 years 8 months |
| Modality | image-general, video, text |
| Stimuli | 13,098 posts and 222,060 comments |
| Participants (N) | not recorded |
| N detail | observational; posts/comments rather than participants |
| Topics | detection-strategies, folk-heuristics, crowds |
Results
| Metric | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Corpus | 13,098 posts; 222,060 comments | 2 years 8 months |
| Strategies catalogued | 12 | prevalence analysed; no percentages in abstract |
| Change over time | strategies and mental models shift with AI capabilities and social trends |
Moderators
- Time / generator generation
Limitations
- Does not measure accuracy of strategies
- Self-selected Reddit communities
- Values not checked against full text
Cited in
- MR-0001: Human Detection of Deepfakes: Accuracy, Bias, Confidence, and Training
Verification
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Status | verified-abstract |
| Compiler confidence | medium |
| Checked on | 2026-10-18 |
| Via | ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIES/article/view/43351 (abstract page) |
Values on this page have not all been checked against the full text. Confirm them against the primary source before high-stakes use.