Synthetic content must be marked
Across all 27 member states it became mandatory to tell a person they are talking to a machine and to mark synthetic audio, image, video and text with a machine-readable label.
Why it matters
The one obligation that survived the summer's softening of the act is the one that concerns not the developer but the person looking.
The amendments of that same summer deferred the high-risk obligations by more than a year, but left Article 50 alone. It requires two different things: transparency in interaction, so that a person knows the other party is a machine, and a technical mark in the file itself, suitable for automatic detection. The second is harder: the mark has to survive re-encoding and cropping, and no common standard existed when the obligation took effect. The same Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 (the 'Digital Omnibus on AI') that deferred the high-risk obligations added a new paragraph 4 to Article 111: providers of systems, including general-purpose ones, generating synthetic content that were already on the market before 2 August 2026 have until 2 December 2026 to meet the technical mark required by Article 50(2) specifically. The interaction-transparency duty in paragraph 1, and the rest of Article 50, carry no such extension; it applies only to systems already on the market and only to the mark itself.