Any regulation only constitutes a strong deterrent against any illegal practice, if such regulation can be efficiently enforced at court or regulatory level. Yet, most consent banners embedding dark patterns go undetected and unsanctioned, as **data** protection regulator's IT resources are largely insufficient to address all the suspected legal breaches (AccessNow, 2020;Brave, 2020). This reality casts doubts on their real possibilities to investigate these matters efficiently, promptly and on a large scale. Thus, there is a need for technical solutions (algorithms and prototypes) to collect and analyze reliable **data** on dark patterns, expedite oversight tasks, warn and protect users, expose manipulative practices, and provide proof of unlawful influence to support legal proceedings. Clearly, automatic detection of the presence of dark patterns at scale is pertinent. However, dark pattern detection is a complex cognitive task which makes the use of artificial intelligence (AI) particularly challenging.