I could probably pull this off and no one would be the wiser; but, I decided I would put this up for debate because it involves a duplicate account.

Would it be considered against the terms of the rules to create a league and have unique/obvious accounts (say parsh1, parsh2, etc) that I can use as AI accounts and gradually fill teams with coworkers/friends?

Obviously, those sub-accounts would only be used in that league.

I would definitely forget all those passwords

I would allow it if you limit it to your private league and are forthcoming about it (which it sounds like you would be)

i thought about doing the same thing but did not want to be disrespectful to jdb. It's just my league only has 5 owners at the moment and I know it is because it is a much slower place than other leagues. So I thought about setting up dummy accounts just so the league can start on time until people start to show more interest. But I am not sure if this would be frowned upon.

I may change my mind in the future, but right now I'm going to allow it as long as it's for the purpose you describe in a private league. That does seem like a fairly large amount of work to keep up with, though, because you'd still have to log in as those users to that league to keep them from being automatically removed, and will also want to do at least some level of management for those teams because the AI won't try to manage them like it would an unowned team.