EU AI Act guides

Yes — if your chat widget is powered by AI and a reasonable visitor might think they're talking to a person, you must tell them. Article 50(1) has been enforceable since 2 August 2026. The fix is usually one line of text in the widget's opening message.

Your legal pages should describe every AI system your visitors encounter, what it processes and who provides it. This corroborates your Article 50 disclosures — it does not replace them, because the obligation is to inform people at the point of interaction.

If you publish AI-generated images, Article 50(2) requires them to carry machine-readable marking — metadata a program can check, not a visible watermark. C2PA Content Credentials and IPTC's DigitalSourceType are the two formats in practical use.

Synthetic audio and video fall under the same Article 50(2) marking obligation as images: machine-readable provenance metadata, not a visible or audible notice. AI voiceovers and generated video are the two cases most site owners miss.

Where these systems are lawfully deployed, everyone exposed to them must be told. In workplaces and educational settings, emotion recognition is prohibited under Article 5 — not a disclosure question but a ban.

If you publish image, audio or video content that resembles real people, places or events and has been artificially generated or manipulated, Article 50(4) requires you to disclose that it is artificial. This is a visible disclosure to people — separate from the machine-readable marking in 50(2).

Only text published to inform the public on matters of public interest triggers a disclosure obligation, and only where there has been no human editorial review. Marketing copy and product descriptions are not covered by this provision.

Article 5 is a ban list, not a disclosure regime. These practices carry the highest penalties in the Act — up to €35 million or 7% of worldwide annual turnover — and no amount of transparency makes them lawful.

Article 53 applies if you place a general-purpose AI model on the EU market. Building a product on top of someone else's model does not make you a provider — fine-tuning and releasing a model may.

None of this is legally required. It is what distinguishes an organisation that thought about AI transparency from one that reacted to a deadline, and it is increasingly what procurement teams look for.

There is no EU AI Act certification scheme for most systems, so a badge claiming one is at best meaningless and at worst a misleading commercial practice. Describe what you have actually done instead.