AI-generated audio and video: what marking is required
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.
What the law requires
Article 50(2) names audio and video explicitly alongside images and text. An AI-generated voiceover on a product video, or a fully synthetic video, is in scope.
Coverage tends to be missed because the media is often produced by a separate team or agency and embedded as a file or a third-party player, so it never passes through whatever review the written content gets.
Where synthetic media also depicts a real person, Art. 50(4) deepfake disclosure applies in addition — those are two distinct obligations with different remedies.
What our scanner looks for
- C2PA manifests in media containers — BMFF uuid boxes carrying the c2pa JUMBF label, covering MP4, M4A and MOV.
- C2PA manifests served over HTTP with a Link header using rel="c2pa-manifest".
- Audio and video assets referenced from your pages that carry no provenance metadata of any kind.
How to fix it
- 1Preserve provenance metadata through your encoding pipeline. Transcoding to a web-friendly bitrate is where it is usually lost.
- 2Sign a C2PA manifest for generated media using the c2pa toolchain, and keep it with the file rather than only in your asset manager.
- 3If a third party produced the media, ask them for the provenance data at delivery. Retrofitting it later means re-exporting from a project file you may not have.
Deadlines and penalties
Enforceable since 2 August 2026, with the same Digital Omnibus carve-out as images: systems already on the market before 2 August 2026 have until 2 December 2026 to comply with the marking requirement.
Free, no account needed. We'll show you every page where this applies, with the evidence.
Common questions
Does an AI voiceover on a product video count?
Yes. Synthetic speech is AI-generated audio, and the marking obligation applies whether or not the visuals are synthetic.
Our video is on YouTube, not our own server. Does that change anything?
The obligation follows the content, not the hosting. Platform-level AI labels may address disclosure to viewers, but they are not a substitute for machine-readable marking of the file itself.
Related
This page describes technical indicators and the obligations they relate to. It is not legal advice. A website scan detects indicators, not legal compliance — which is why our reports say “no issues detected” and never “compliant”.