Since Sunday, "we used AI" is a disclosure, not a brag
EU AI Act Article 50 is live. The obligation lands on you, not your vendor.
Wonderful Tuesday we have! Let’s crack on with today’s.
Nobody sent a calendar invite. On 2 August, Article 50 of the EU AI Act became applicable, and a chunk of what your team ships is now inside it.
Read who it lands on, because that’s the part people get wrong. Providers, meaning the model vendors, have to build systems that tell people they’re talking to an AI and mark generated output so it can be detected. Deployers have to inform people they’re exposed to deepfakes, to emotion recognition and biometric categorization, and to text publications on matters of public interest “without human review or editorial control.”
You are the deployer. Your agency is a deployer. Your vendor’s compliance page does not cover you.
The exemption in that last clause is the whole ballgame, and it’s good news if your workflow is honest. Text with genuine human review and editorial control sits outside the labeling duty. The blog nobody edits does not.
Enforcement runs through national market surveillance authorities and the AI Office, not through a single regulator you can call. The Commission has published a voluntary Code of Practice on transparency with sections for providers and deployers, plus an official icon set for labeling. About 190 organizations had signed by the end of July.
Signing is voluntary. Demonstrating equivalent measures, if you don’t sign, is mandatory. One of those is a form, and the other is a project.
TALK ON THE MARKET
Julia Donnelly, CFO of Pinterest, explaining a soft quarter to analysts:
“We faced incremental pressure mid-quarter from Asia-based cross-border retailers impacted by regulatory actions, particularly in Europe, and that pressure is continuing in the third quarter.”
Different regulation, same lesson. A CFO stood on an earnings call and named European rules as the reason the number moved. Compliance stopped being a legal cost line somewhere around the point it started showing up in guidance.
NUMBERS MATTER
8% and 6%. Lower cost per impression and lower cost per acquisition for advertisers using Amazon’s Ads Agent targeting, by Amazon’s own account, now live in 11 more countries this year. Single digits. That’s what agentic media buying pays today, from the company with the most to gain from a bigger number.
DAILY PROMPT
Draft an AI acceptable use policy for a marketing team operating in the EU. Cover: which content types require a visible AI disclosure and which don’t, what counts as genuine human review and editorial control, who signs off before publication, how we record that review so it’s evidenceable months later, and what happens when an agency or freelancer uses AI on our behalf. Flag every place my current process would fail an audit.
Use this in the next week, not the next quarter, and take the output to legal rather than asking legal to start from nothing. Most teams will find the policy is easy and the evidence trail is the hard part.
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CMO CORNER
Build systems that make the right outcome easy and the wrong one hard.
Compliance written as a policy document gets read once. Compliance written into the workflow, where publishing without a recorded reviewer is simply not a button anyone can press, holds up when the person who wrote the policy is on holiday. Change the default, not the guidance.
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TOOL UPGRADE
Disclosure obligations need a paper trail, and a paper trail needs tooling. Three for the evidence side:
Originality.ai best for checking what your agency actually handed you before you put your name on it. Try Originality here →
Brand24 best for catching the moment someone outside the building notices something you published, while it’s still one post. Try Brand24 here →
Databox best for pulling the review and publishing record into one place a regulator or a board could actually read. Try Databox here →
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LEARN THIS
If your governance currently lives in one person’s head: the Scaling & Governance Starter Kit. It’s built around just enough structure to keep velocity while protecting brand and data, including an AI maturity ladder that tells you honestly which stage you’re at, based on the signals in your own team. For the leader who now has to prove a process exists rather than describe one.
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That’s it for today!
See you next time,
— Peter & Torsten
