AI Has to Say It's AI Now
Chatbots, AI content, and deepfakes you wouldn't call deepfakes. Applies August 2.
When the Omnibus on AI deal landed in May, it read as relief. High-risk obligations for Annex III systems: pushed to December 2027. AI embedded in the regulated products listed in Annex I: August 2028. If the AI Act sits in your portfolio, next to everything else that does, you probably made the reasonable mental note. Revisit next year.
The note is wrong by one chapter.
Article 50, the transparency rules, did not move. It applies from August 2, 2026. This Sunday. And on July 20, less than two weeks before the deadline, the European Commission published its final guidelines on how to comply. Thirteen days of runway. Brussels’ idea of a running start.
The timing is inconvenient. But I would say that the substance matters more. Article 50 reaches more companies than the high-risk chapter ever will. The high-risk rules catch CV-screening tools and credit scoring. Article 50 catches the chatbot on your website, the AI-generated visuals in your marketing, and the product descriptions your content team stopped writing by hand more than a year ago.
What Article 50 Is
The AI Act sorts systems by risk: prohibited, high-risk, transparency-risk, minimal. Article 50 is the third box. It also stacks on the second, because Article 50(6) says the transparency duties do not affect the Chapter III requirements for high-risk systems. So there is no “we’re not high-risk, so we’re fine,” and no “we’re already doing the high-risk work, so this is covered.” Article 50 applies to any AI system used in four specific situations, whatever else is true about it.
The four situations:
An AI system interacts directly with people (chatbots, voice assistants, AI agents)
An AI system generates synthetic content (text, images, audio, video)
An AI system runs emotion recognition or biometric categorisation on people
AI-generated content gets published: deepfakes, or text informing the public on matters of public interest
Breach the transparency rules and the ceiling is €15 million or 3% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher (Article 99(4)(g)). For SMEs and start-ups the calculation flips to whichever is lower, and the European Commission’s guidance now extends that proportionality to small mid-cap companies as well. Not the €35 million tier reserved for prohibited practices. Still not a rounding error.
Two of the four obligations belong to providers, the companies that build the systems. Two belong to deployers, the companies that use them. You may be both. A company that builds a customer-facing bot on top of a foundation model and also publishes AI-generated content holds obligations on both sides.
One carve-out runs through all four: systems authorised by law to detect, prevent, investigate or prosecute criminal offences are excepted, with conditions. If you are not in law enforcement, it will not help you.
The Provider Duties (Systems That Talk or Generate)
If you provide an AI system that interacts with people, Article 50(1) requires it to be designed so that people know they are talking to AI. From the start of the first interaction. Clear, distinguishable, accessible.
There is an exception where this is obvious. The guidelines then spend considerable effort narrowing what counts as obvious:
the test is a reasonably well-informed, observant and circumspect person, judged against your actual audience,
And the Commission says to read the exception restrictively. A widget labelled “Assistant” is not disclosure. And the obligation protects natural persons, not just consumers: the Commission reads it to cover consumers, professionals and other users alike, which is why the internal HR bot your employees use counts too.
One detail for anyone building agents. The guidelines confirm AI agents fall under Article 50(1), and where a provider cannot reliably predict whether the agent will end up interacting with a human, it should be designed to disclose its AI nature in all situations where such interaction is reasonably foreseeable. The agent has to introduce itself. Few of the agent demos circulating are designed for this.
If you provide a system that generates synthetic content, Article 50(2) requires the outputs to be marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as AI-generated. This is the watermarking obligation: metadata, watermarks, provenance signals. Article 50(2) asks for solutions that are effective, interoperable, robust and reliable, so far as technically feasible. The Code of Practice published in June prescribes no single technique, and the reason is not hard to see: no marking method available today satisfies all four criteria on its own. Expect to layer them.
The exemptions are worth reading before you panic-procure a watermarking vendor. Standard editing assistance is out: spell-check, grammar, quality improvements, anything that does not substantially alter the data or its meaning. So are short sequences of numbers or letters, source code, and outputs that never reach a human. Content that stays inside closed industrial pipelines is out too, with a condition: the exemption falls away for the final output. The AI-generated asset that actually ships is not covered. The guidelines also include a narrow exemption for certain business-to-business and industrial contexts. Open-source systems, for the record, are not exempt.
The Deployer Duties: Where You Might Come In
Most readers of this newsletter are not building foundation models. You are using AI systems under your own authority, professionally. That probably makes you a deployer, and two obligations are yours.
If you deploy emotion recognition or biometric categorization, Article 50(3) requires you to inform the people exposed to it. Sentiment analysis in the call centre, demographic categorisation in retail analytics. Real-time or after the fact, both count. But screen against Article 5 first: inferring emotions in the workplace or in education institutions is prohibited outright, save for narrow medical and safety purposes. Where the ban applies, it is not a disclosure question at all.
If you use AI to create deepfakes, Article 50(4) requires you to disclose that the content is artificially generated or manipulated. Visibly. At first exposure. And this is where the definitions deserve your attention, because the word “deepfake” suggests malice, and the definition does not require any.
A deepfake under Article 3(60) is
AI-generated or manipulated image, audio or video that resembles existing persons, objects, places, entities or events, and would falsely appear authentic.
Three criteria: resemblance, something that exists or plausibly could, and the capacity to mislead about authenticity. Dragons are out. Talking animals are out. Standard film production, color correction, noise reduction: out.
An authentic photo of an empty apartment, furnished by AI for the listing: in. That example is not mine. It appears in the Commission’s own labelling guidance, as a case for the “partially AI-modified” label. Product visuals, staged scenes, AI photography of real places. Your marketing department has deepfake obligations. It has probably not been told.
The second half of Article 50(4) covers text.
Publish AI-generated text with the purpose of informing the public on matters of public interest, and you must disclose it. The public-interest list is long. Politics and democratic processes, public administration and services, justice and law enforcement, fundamental rights, public security, public health, environmental protection, consumer safety, plus economic, financial, scientific and cultural developments that may be relevant to public debate. A fair amount of corporate publishing brushes against that.
Most corporate text will escape through the exemption: no label needed where the text underwent human review or editorial control, and a person holds editorial responsibility for it. Read the definitions before you rely on them.
Human review means deliberate examination of the substance by someone with relevant knowledge and professional judgement.
Editorial control means the authority to approve, alter or reject the content on substantive grounds, fact-checking included.
And editorial responsibility, per the European Commission, means someone holds the ultimate legal responsibility for the publication. A spell-check pass is none of the three. If your workflow is “AI drafts it, someone skims it, it ships,” you have a choice: make the review real and documented, with a name attached, or add the label.
The Watermark Is Not the Label
Your AI vendor markets its compliance. The model watermarks its outputs, embeds provenance metadata, signs the Code of Practice. You might conclude that content generated with a compliant tool is compliant content.
The two obligations are two layers, and only one of them is the vendor’s.
The machine-readable mark under Article 50(2) is the provider’s job: invisible, embedded, readable by detection tools. Y
our disclosure duty under Article 50(4) is a separate, visible layer: a label a person can see or hear without any tool at all.
The Commission’s Q&A says it plainly: deployers cannot simply rely on the machine-readable marking embedded by the provider to fulfill their disclosure obligation.
The provider marks. You label. A compliant tool does not make your published deepfake compliant. It just means the invisible half was done by someone else.
How to Label, Practically
The EU published a set of official icons in June. Three of them:
a basic “AI” icon,
one for fully AI-generated content,
one for partially AI-modified content.
They are free to download (SVG and PNG), free to use, no attribution required.
The placement rules, from the Code of Practice: perceivable at first exposure, not hidden behind overlays, embedded directly into the content (creative works get more flexibility), and still visible when the content is reshared or downloaded.
The Commission user-tested the icons and found they perform better with a text label attached, “modified” or similar. The icon that needs a caption to work.
Two things to hold apart: the icons are optional, the labelling is not. The Commission says so itself, so downloading the icon set does not close the file. Using these icons does not establish legal compliance by itself. It is the same trap as the watermark, one layer up.
You can use your own disclosure format if it is clear, distinguishable and accessible. What I think will not survive that test: a small line in the website footer, a faint watermark on an image, a label that flashes for a frame, anything buried in the terms and conditions.
For artistic, creative, satirical or fictional work, the obligation softens: disclose the manipulation exists, in a way that does not hamper the display or enjoyment of the work. A credits-style disclosure rather than a stamp across the screen.
The Dates
August 2, 2026: everything above applies. Chatbot disclosure, emotion-recognition notice, deepfake and text labelling, and the marking obligation for systems placed on the market from that date.
There is no exception under Article 50. The transitional regime in Article 111, the one that lets certain legacy high-risk systems stay outside the AI Act unless they are significantly changed, has no equivalent here. A chatbot you launched in 2023 is in scope on Sunday. So is the generative tool your team has been using since last spring. One exception, and it is narrow.
December 2, 2026: Providers of generative systems already on the market before August 2 get four extra months, for the machine-readable marking obligation only. Nothing else is deferred, and no deployer obligation is deferred at all.
The four months come from the Omnibus on AI, published in the Official Journal on July 24 and in force three days later. Five days before the deadline it modifies. Confirm the publication date yourself before you rely on it, because it landed the same week this article went out.
Content generated before August 2 does not need retroactive labels. The Commission encourages them anyway.
What to Do This Week
If you are wondering what to do now, there are five moves needed:
Inventory the four situations. One page: where do we have systems talking to people, systems generating content, emotion recognition, published AI content? You cannot label what you have not listed.
Fix the chatbot disclosure. The cheapest obligation on the list: a clear line at the start of the first interaction. Include the internal bots.
Audit published content against the deepfake definition. Not “do we make deepfakes” but “do our visuals depict real or plausible people, places or products in a way that looks authentic.” Start with marketing, where most of the exposure sits.
Decide your text position. For anything AI-written that informs the public: real, documented human review with named responsibility, or a label. Pick one per content stream and write it down.
Ask your vendors two questions. Do your systems mark outputs in machine-readable format, and can we detect it? Their answer covers their layer. Then set up yours.
What Sits Underneath
Enforcement mostly belongs to national market surveillance authorities, and they are behind. The designation deadline was August 2025. As of June, nine member states had designated both their market surveillance and notifying authorities. National penalty laws are similarly unfinished. The enforcers are not missing so much as untested and unevenly resourced, since most member states are handing AI competence to regulators that already exist and already have full desks.
Two reasons not to treat that as breathing room.
The AI Office is not behind. It is competent for AI systems built on general-purpose AI models where the same entity provides both, and for systems integrated into the very large platforms designated under the Digital Services Act. The Omnibus on AI widened its remit further. If your chatbot sits on a foundation model from the company that also built the model, your enforcer is in Brussels, fully staffed.
And Article 50 breaches are the most visible violations in the entire AI Act. A missing chatbot disclosure, an unlabelled AI visual: public, permanent, screenshot-able by any competitor, journalist or future regulator with a scrolling habit. The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2005/29/EC) already reaches deceptive content today, enforced by consumer authorities that very much exist.
The transparency rules arrive Sunday. Some of the enforcers are still being appointed.
Your audience is already here.
As always, thank you for clarifying the requirements! Silvia is my best source to keep up with the EU AI Act changes when I'm busy. Consumers deserve AI labeling as a basic protection. The breaking point will be these critical companies, like in healthcare, that pass on generative AI responses as technical expertise, either through chatbots or other user touchpoints. Consumers should know the source so they can make an informed decision to walk to the competitor, especially in high-stakes services.