From today, an AI in Europe is legally required to tell you it's an AI
Article 50 of the EU AI Act becomes enforceable on 2 August 2026. Chatbots must disclose they're machines. AI-generated images, audio and video must carry machine-readable marking. Deepfakes must be labelled. Emotion-recognition systems must tell you they're running. Up to €15m or 3% of global turnover.
The UK isn't covered. We'll see the labels anyway, nobody builds a separate unlabelled version for one market.
The interesting part is how quietly this applies to things nobody files under "AI product": the support chat, the rejection email, the stock image, the voice on the phone.
But a label tells you what something is. It doesn't tell you whether to believe it. My generation learned to ask "is this real?", my children will need the harder question: "I know it's a machine. So what now?"
That's judgement, not detection. And judgement doesn't grow just because someone added a line of small print.
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