Analysts said AI disclosure was necessary but insufficient.
“Firms can still exploit vulnerability through design choices that mimic scarcity, jealousy, exclusivity, or emotional urgency,” Wong said.
China has written that rule for its own market.
Interim measures on “anthropomorphic” AI interaction services, in force since Jul 15, require providers to tell users they are talking to a machine, repeat that warning in a pop-up if a user shows signs of dependence, and flag time spent every two hours of continuous use.
This was undeclared AI abroad.
“If Beijing wishes to present itself as a responsible AI power, then such episodes do register,” Wong said, “because they reveal the persistent gap between high-level narratives of ‘safe’ or ‘beneficial’ AI and the mundane commercial realities through which AI is actually deployed”.
Asked about the challenges of policing such cases, Hanley said online fraud more broadly exploits the gaps – between jurisdictions, and between platforms such as social media, dating apps, banks, crypto exchanges and telcos, each of which has its own interests.
Any detection tool built to counter them “might already be obsolete in six months because the scammers are evolving”.
“We are kind of playing an AI arms race with them, but we’re losing, because I don’t think that on our side, we have a coherent strategy.”
“And I think we’re really just at the tip of the iceberg,” Hanley added.
In other dating scams, he said, women in scam compounds are kept on video calls with targets all day.
What AI changes is the scale: machines can hold thousands of conversations at once.
HKU’s Wong said hiring people to make the bot look real was the least surprising part.
“Emotional deception becomes more scalable, more data-driven, and more difficult to detect.”
Meanwhile, the challenge, Wong wrote, “is not simply to make synthetic companionship more honest, but to ask why so many people are being pushed toward paid simulations of care in the first place”.
Calix is back on the ordinary dating apps, now “more cautious”. Asked how he would spot another AI posing as human, he was not sure.
“I guess ask some strange questions, or tell them, ‘Take a picture with a fork’ or something like that.”