AI Labelling Requirement

Under Article 50 of the EU AI Act, specific transparency duties have applied across the EU since 2 August 2026: chatbots must make clear to users that they are interacting with an AI; photorealistic AI-generated or AI-manipulated images, audio and video (deepfakes) must be labelled as such; and AI-generated text on matters of public interest published without editorial control is subject to a disclosure duty as well. The split of roles matters here: providers of the systems have to mark outputs in a machine-readable format and make them detectable as artificially generated under Article 50(2), whereas deployers owe the disclosure that people actually see under Article 50(4). For providers of systems generating synthetic content that were already placed on the market before 2 August 2026, the Commission's official timeline sets a transitional deadline of 2 December 2026 for complying with Article 50(2). Individual platforms such as social media services require their own, sometimes stricter, labels on top of that. Whatever the precise legal position, an open and transparent approach to AI assistance in image, audio, video and text content is advisable for companies, not least as a trust signal.