European Commission Guidelines on Technical Marking for ‘Synthetic Contents’
Chatbots and assistants will have to be identified as such. Text and images generated by LLMs will also need to be labeled. The AI Office will be able to conduct audits, impose corrective measures, and apply sanctions to providers of generalist AI models.
More transparency for those who market or use chatbots, image, audio and synthetic video generators , emotion recognition systems and tools capable of producing deepfakes.
These are the main obligations that will become applicable on 2 August 2026, the date on which the transparency obligations set out in the AI Act , the world’s first comprehensive regulation on Artificial Intelligence, will apply in the European Union , in force from 1 August 2024.
Violations are subject to fines of up to €15 million or, for businesses, up to 3% of the total annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher. The first new regulation is that people will have to be informed when they interact with an AI system, unless this is obvious.
This clarity is useful for users, especially for vulnerable groups such as minors. Synthetic content must have a machine-readable technical markup provided by providers, and users (deployers) must provide information. An exception is made for texts of public interest that are subject to human review or editorial control , for which a natural or legal person assumes editorial responsibility. Specifically, users of artificial intelligence systems (deployers) must inform users if they are “exposed to deepfakes, AI-generated content on matters of public interest without human review or editorial control, and emotion recognition or biometric categorization systems.
“Providers must ensure, in the case of systems that generate audio, image, video, or synthetic text content, that the technical solutions adopted are “effective, interoperable, robust, and reliable as specified in the relevant technical standards.” “Two years after the AI Act came into force, things are starting to get serious,” Ernesto Belisario , a lawyer specializing in new technology law, explained to ANSA. “However, we need to move faster: guidelines published less than two weeks before the deadline leave companies with very little time to adapt to technologies that are evolving so quickly.”
