On August 2, Article 50 of the EU AI Act became enforceable. Under the new transparency rules, AI-generated or AI-manipulated content must be clearly and visibly labeled with machine-readable marks; people must be told when they are interacting with a chatbot, an AI agent, or an avatar rather than a person; and deepfakes must be disclosed. The European Commission even shipped an icon set for the labels. Fines run up to 15 million euros or 3% of global annual revenue, with national market surveillance authorities and the European AI Office enforcing.
The regulation is not just a frontier lab story; the text says “deployer.” Frontier labs (the model makers) must build machine-readable marks into their systems. Deployers must inform people when they are exposed to a deepfake, an emotion-recognition or biometric-categorisation tool, or AI-generated text “published on matters of public interest without human review or editorial control.”
The deployer is the entity doing the publishing, which is basically everyone who publishes AI-assisted content.
Importantly, the Commission’s guidelines carve out standard editing, so grammar fixes and minor touch-ups trigger nothing, which removes the routine middle of every workflow. The rules also promise proportional treatment for SMEs and small mid-caps. Proportionality shapes how you comply (as opposed to whether you do or don’t), and the carve-out leaves the deepfake and the unreviewed public-interest text squarely in scope. Those are exactly the outputs content businesses ship at volume.
There is a safe harbor. Adherence to the EU’s Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content demonstrates compliance, and equivalent measures are accepted. Over time, marking will flow upstream into the tools, and deployers will inherit compliance by default. Until then, the label is the publisher’s job.
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Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.
About Shelly Palmer
Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media and marketing. Named LinkedIn’s “Top Voice in Technology,” he covers tech and business for Good Day New York, is a regular commentator on CNN and writes a popular daily business blog. He's a bestselling author, and the creator of the popular, free online course, Generative AI for Execs. Follow @shellypalmer or visit shellypalmer.com.