EU AI Act
What EU AI Act Article 50 actually requires.
A technical explainer, not legal advice.
Important: Verbitas helps implement technical measures. It does not provide legal compliance advice and does not guarantee Article 50 compliance. Consult qualified legal counsel for your specific obligations.
The EU AI Act establishes transparency obligations for AI systems that generate synthetic content (Article 50). The requirements most AI providers need to address: machine-readable marking of AI-generated images, audio, and video; human-imperceptible marking (invisible watermarks); and deep-fake disclosure for synthetic portrayals of real persons.
Key requirements
§50(2) — Machine-readable marking
AI systems that generate images, audio, or video must mark those outputs in a machine-readable format detectable by automated tools. C2PA 2.4 manifests satisfy this requirement.
§50(2) — Human-imperceptible marking
The marking must also include a format imperceptible to humans — an invisible watermark. TrustMark (image), AudioSeal (audio), and VideoSeal (video) satisfy this requirement.
§50(4) — Deep-fake disclosure
AI systems generating realistic synthetic portrayals of real persons must disclose this in a clearly visible manner. Verbitas provides the disclosure_assertion in the manifest; the deployer must implement the visible UI disclosure.
§50(4) ¶2 — Public-interest text
AI systems generating text for public-interest purposes (news, elections) must disclose AI authorship. Verbitas provides text-genai-disclosure-v1 recipe for generation-time marking.
How Verbitas helps
Verbitas provides the technical measures — C2PA manifests (machine-readable) and invisible watermarks (human-imperceptible) — that help AI providers implement Article 50 requirements. The platform also provides an audit log for record-keeping.
EU AI Act and content provenance.
Verbitas provides the technical infrastructure. Compliance is your responsibility.