There is no shortage of things to talk about when it comes to AI. The trick is working out what actually matters for marketing teams right now, and this one matters: the EU AI Act's transparency rules, Article 50, apply from the 2nd of August. The European Commission only adopted its final guidelines on 20 July, so this is genuinely hot off the press, and I would recommend every marketing leader does some proper digging on it.

Quick health warning before we start: I am a marketer, not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. It is my read of where this lands for marketing teams. The Commission's Article 50 text and the guidelines are both public if you want the source material.

The big shift: responsibility is moving to the producer

Here is my summary of what is actually changing. Up to now, we produce images, we can use AI, and the platforms and their systems will often pick those up and flag them. Flagging AI has effectively been the platform's job. What the transparency rules do is pass that responsibility to the producer of the content. If you are producing images with AI, you now need to say you used AI to create them. It is no longer just down to the platform to discover it and flag it. It is down to you.

The Act splits duties between providers of AI systems and businesses deploying them, and responsibility travels along that chain rather than sitting neatly with your tool vendor. Which is exactly why this lands on marketing teams and not just on OpenAI.

What is actually in scope

The rules are aimed at content where you are not 100% sure what you are looking at. If you are an advertiser using AI to produce photorealistic content, say a fake human modelling clothes, that needs to be labelled as AI-generated. Realistically, if AI is in your production process and the output is photorealistic, a person, a place, a product in a place, you are now responsible for declaring it.

A few important edges to that:

  • It is not retrospective. Content created before the 2nd of August does not need to be labelled after the fact. Anything going forward that will appear in the EU does.
  • UK-based does not mean out of scope. If your content can appear in front of EU citizens, and online it usually can, you should be paying attention.
  • Images are not the whole story. Article 50 also covers chatbots, which must disclose they are AI at the first interaction, emotion recognition and biometric tools, which require telling the people exposed to them, and AI-written text on public-interest topics, which needs labelling unless a human has genuine editorial control over it.

Plenty of the detail will be up for debate, and I am sure it will not be clear-cut in practice. But the direction is clear.

A label is not a get-out-of-jail-free card

Google has also introduced AI disclosure labels for adverts, so you can mark an ad as produced with AI. Useful, but it is not a catch-all. Slapping the label on does not make the ad legally compliant. You still cannot produce random images that do not represent your product. There is a whole accountability piece here, and the label is one part of it, not a substitute for it.

"But we could always do this with Photoshop"

I get it. Image manipulation is not new, and none of this existed for Photoshop. The difference is that AI can do it at vast scale, very quickly, and you no longer need to be an expert. You used to have to be genuinely good at Photoshop to manipulate an image convincingly. Now it is prompt-driven. That is why regulators are moving, and honestly, I think it makes sense.

How long will this actually matter?

Here is my view, and time will tell. I think this is partly a covering-the-bases phase while people are saying “I don't like AI images.” In two years' time, that is largely what they are going to get anyway, and I suspect it becomes a non-issue, the same way people once did not want to buy things on their phones. Remember that? Nobody even considers it now. A lot of this is an adoption curve, helping people get confident and familiar with AI content.

There will always be a need for human content, because there are moments where you just want that authenticity. But AI is getting so much better that you will increasingly get authenticity of the product through AI too. It will keep the product exactly as it is and change the bits around it, backgrounds and settings, rather than the thing itself.

On enforcement: I do not know how strict they are going to be, and I would expect a period of everyone getting used to the idea. But as ever with regulation, they may well look to make examples, particularly of bigger organisations or anyone who deliberately flouts the rules. The fines go up to 15 million euros or 3% of global turnover, so it is worth being mindful in the short term while user sentiment is still “I don't want AI images, or I need to know if it is AI.”

The practical bit: build it into your sign-off process

What I would recommend for marketing teams is simple:

  • Identify where AI is used in your production process.
  • Review that content, and decide whether you need to disclose it against the rules.
  • Build it into sign-off. You already check creative through compliance on product, pricing and language. Add another column to the Trello or Asana board: are we declaring whether this is AI, and has it been checked?

That extra layer of checking is a quick, practical step while we all familiarise ourselves with the detail of the policy.

And should you rush to get everything published before the 2nd of August? I would not recommend that either. Do it legitimately.

If you want a structured look at where your marketing stack sits against this, it is exactly the kind of thing I do through AI audits and consultation, and with the team at Sleeping Giant Media on the content and search side. Or just get in touch and tell me what your setup looks like.

Luke