AI Transparency Deadline Approaching
These EU AI Act provisions will start to apply on August 2 | Edition #307
On August 2, the following provisions of the EU AI Act will become enforceable, and non-compliance might lead to fines:
1. Transparency of AI systems intended to interact directly with natural persons (article 50 § 1):
“Providers shall ensure that AI systems intended to interact directly with natural persons are designed and developed in such a way that the natural persons concerned are informed that they are interacting with an AI system, unless this is obvious from the point of view of a natural person who is reasonably well-informed, observant and circumspect, taking into account the circumstances and the context of use. This obligation shall not apply to AI systems authorised by law to detect, prevent, investigate or prosecute criminal offences, subject to appropriate safeguards for the rights and freedoms of third parties, unless those systems are available for the public to report a criminal offence.”
2. Machine-readable watermarking of AI-generated content (article 50 § 2):
*Exception: AI systems already on the market before August 2 will benefit from a grace period, according to the Digital Omnibus on AI, and their providers will have until December 2 to comply.
“Providers of AI systems, including general-purpose AI systems, generating synthetic audio, image, video or text content, shall ensure that the outputs of the AI system are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated. Providers shall ensure their technical solutions are effective, interoperable, robust and reliable as far as this is technically feasible, taking into account the specificities and limitations of various types of content, the costs of implementation and the generally acknowledged state of the art, as may be reflected in relevant technical standards. This obligation shall not apply to the extent the AI systems perform an assistive function for standard editing or do not substantially alter the input data provided by the deployer or the semantics thereof, or where authorised by law to detect, prevent, investigate or prosecute criminal offences.”
3. Biometric categorization system transparency (article 50 § 3):
“Deployers of an emotion recognition system or a biometric categorisation system shall inform the natural persons exposed thereto of the operation of the system, and shall process the personal data in accordance with Regulations (EU) 2016/679 and (EU) 2018/1725 and Directive (EU) 2016/680, as applicable. This obligation shall not apply to AI systems used for biometric categorisation and emotion recognition, which are permitted by law to detect, prevent or investigate criminal offences, subject to appropriate safeguards for the rights and freedoms of third parties, and in accordance with Union law.”
4. Deepfake disclosure (article 50 § 4):
“Deployers of an AI system that generates or manipulates image, audio or video content constituting a deep fake, shall disclose that the content has been artificially generated or manipulated. This obligation shall not apply where the use is authorised by law to detect, prevent, investigate or prosecute criminal offence. Where the content forms part of an evidently artistic, creative, satirical, fictional or analogous work or programme, the transparency obligations set out in this paragraph are limited to disclosure of the existence of such generated or manipulated content in an appropriate manner that does not hamper the display or enjoyment of the work.”
Download here the official EU guidelines for these transparency obligations.
A reminder that, following the approval of the Digital Omnibus on AI, some of the AI Act obligations originally scheduled for August 2 were postponed, including the rules for high-risk AI systems. I wrote about these new deadlines here.
To learn more about the EU AI Act from a practical perspective, as well as the latest AI policy developments in the U.S. and China, I recommend joining the 31st cohort of my Global AI Policy, Ethics & Regulation Training Program. Register here.
The deadline turns transparency into design work. A visible label helps, but the real trust signal is boring provenance: who reviewed it, what changed, and where the human takes responsibility.