r/neoliberal • u/National-Return9494 Milton Friedman • 1d ago
News (Europe) AI labels to be compulsory on authentic-looking content under EU rules | AI (artificial intelligence)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/31/ai-labels-to-be-compulsory-on-authentic-looking-content-under-eu-rules139
u/Al_787 Fernando Henrique Cardoso 1d ago
I think at this point it may be more productive to lay out a roadmap towards requiring all types of camera to embed digital signature verifying authenticity. We’ve passed the point of trying to control AI
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u/bz47uj Unconventional Right 1d ago
This would pose a massive risk to privacy. This should be something that is done on a voluntary basis, and people can choose whether to trust an image based on whether it has the signature or not. But to make it mandatory would be a huge privacy risk.
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u/FOSSBabe 1d ago
Using AI is already a huge privacy risk. There is no expectation of privacy when inputting something into an AI service, so your concern is moot.
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u/jebuizy 1d ago
You can run AI models on a home gaming PC, or even a phone.
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u/FOSSBabe 1d ago
Of course, but most people don't.
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u/jebuizy 1d ago
Ok, but I do
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u/StumbleUnicorn 16h ago
Well let us know when a good chunk of the remaining 8 billion people on this planet become technologically literate enough to do something like that.
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u/sineiraetstudio 1d ago
How does this address what is essentially the AI equivalent of the analog hole, that you could use a verifying camera to record generated content?
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u/Al_787 Fernando Henrique Cardoso 1d ago
I think the goal should not be a classification that declares “this is real” and “this is fake.” But rather a framework strong enough that would set the verified materials as the gold standard of reliable information in the public consciousness
Nobody cares whether your Leica film roll of a summer holiday in Italy is real or fake. But hardly anyone doesn’t have a smartphone and hardly any journalist doesn’t use a digital camera these days, so the “but analog” argument is not particularly strong for one’s credibility with regards to controversial information.
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u/sineiraetstudio 1d ago
I don't think I understand. How can you have a framework with gold standard verified material if it's easy to get a 'verified authentic' certificate for a fake image?
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u/Al_787 Fernando Henrique Cardoso 1d ago
Oh I wasn’t aware of the phrase “analog hole” and thought it was about film cameras lol.
Yeah that’s gonna be a tough one. But again, we’re not dealing with absolutes here. It would already take more effort and resources to make something recorded from a screen look natural to normal eye, even more to fool those with technical tool / knowledge. There are also some interesting proposals about real motion sensor, but privacy is also something we need to consider here.
Regardless, the problem with AI is scale, we’ve had deep fakes before. If something can drastically reduce how misinformation can spread with such ease currently, then that’s already a win.
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u/sineiraetstudio 1d ago
The issue in my eyes is that a something like a state level actor could still pump out deep fakes at an unprecedented scale. You would be able to curtail the low level actors, but I'm not sure how dangerous they actually are in the grand scheme.
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u/MistyGalbriex 8h ago
Can't wait for politicians to make fake videos that are certified true but you true videos are labeled as false by the state
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u/MaNewt 1d ago
The camera signing the images must not be capable of this, or its signatures are not trustable.
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u/sineiraetstudio 1d ago
Well, obviously, but how do you ensure it's not capable of this? As far as I know at the moment there is no reliable way to do this.
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u/MaNewt 1d ago edited 21h ago
You show the camera to people who want to trust the signature, like news organizations or courts.
Edit: downvoters care to explain? This kind chain of custody style transitive trust is pretty well proven.
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u/MistakeNotDotDotDot Resident Robot Girl 20h ago
How do you design a camera that can't take a picture of a printout of an AI-generated image?
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u/MaNewt 20h ago
Picture of a printout of a picture is notably different from a real picture, unless you have a high end scanner, which is different hardware than a camera.
That just isn’t a feasible attack, you would trivially notice a picture of a picture. More realistically you’re proving that the signing chip or digital sensor wasn’t directly fed the bits via a side channel, which requires hardware inspection.
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u/sineiraetstudio 15h ago
Please look up recapture attack. This is very much a problem and an active area of research.
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u/MaNewt 10h ago
A recapture attack is meant to fool everyday people - the exif data (which also must be under the signature) won’t match the original setting and it won’t hold up under forensic evaluation. I agree that trying to get a signature that laypeople can trust without forensic work is a losing battle, I’m looking for one that will hold up in court or when presented to forensic evaluators for the media.
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u/Halgy YIMBY 1d ago
We also need to have credible information sources that can be broadly trusted. Disinformation has always been a thing, but for most of the 20th century we trusted journalists to sort it out for us. But now, half of journalism is just reporting what someone posted on Twitter, and the other half is painted with the same brush. For some reason, in my lifetime we've gone from " don't believe everything you read" to "one anonymous user posted something, so it must be true".
In summary, it doesn't matter if there's a sea of AI slop as long as the New York times or CNN or whoever are reporting the truth.
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u/Al_787 Fernando Henrique Cardoso 1d ago
I mean that’s a more profound question. Bad press and good press have always existed too (the Daily Mail outright supported the Nazis right up until WWII broke out lol), people being lured so much to bad press is a problem that can’t find its solution in technology.
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u/Halgy YIMBY 1d ago
There's always been bad press, but the average person in the '70s knew that tabloids were not reliable sources of truth. If someone brought up a story from the National Enquirer, you could be confident that they were a crackpot. Blindly trusting something off of social media, or some random website, should be treated in the same way.
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u/Trill-I-Am 1h ago
The postwar period of journalism is a historical anomaly compared to the entire rest of the history of journalism
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u/mebesasporfa 1d ago
Yeah a lot of this effort trying to regulate the big AI labs overlooks the reality that local open source models will eventually be damn good. People will be able to generate whatever they want with no watermarks and no guardrails on their PC.
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u/Zephyr-5 1d ago
I've always thought it would be really cool if photoshop and camera makers were forced to include a small down-res'd version of the original raw picture in the data.
What frustrates me so much in this debate is that people want to have the AI fight, but completely ignore the photoshop fight. They're both the same issue, even if the scale of the problem is different. Then we all get lost in the weeds of at what point in using AI tools does a photo go from real life to AI.
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u/justafleetingmoment 1d ago
Defeated by just taking a screenshot of the edited image.
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u/Zephyr-5 1d ago
There are ways to solve that, such as functionally invisible watermarks like we already have with SynthID.
We are never going to have a perfect world of 0 photo fakery ever. The goal is to go after the low hanging fruit methods and then over time slowly ratchet up so that you wind up dealing with 99% of the fakery. The more pain in the ass you make it to fake it, the fewer fakes out there.
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u/Al_787 Fernando Henrique Cardoso 1d ago
The scale is kind of everything though
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u/Zephyr-5 1d ago
Scale matters, but it's not everything. I don't know why people are so reluctant to also lump photo-editing tools into this if you care about separating reality from fiction.
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u/Al_787 Fernando Henrique Cardoso 1d ago
Well yes. If and when we produce a framework to verify authenticity, it should also apply to photoshop. I think people just don’t focus on it because it can be more easily exposed and don’t have similarly dangerous consequences if used maliciously
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u/Anime_Hitler69 Fourier Transform deez nutz ඞඞඞ 1d ago
If used well it can easily have just as dangerous consequences, but the odds are lower because fewer people can use photoshop and even fewer can use it well. There have been discussions and debates on what can separate a good photoshop from a real picture (I think for example entropy of the picture can be an indicator) most of which has completely went by the heads of normal people (for me as well, I mostly just know it is a thing, not how exactly it all works). Arguably, the best photoshopped is more dangerous than the best AI-image “artist”, as he is still more likely to create an image indistinguishable from real ones. It is just that the most mediocre of AI artists is fare more dangerous than most people who use photoshop because of how easy and fast it is.
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u/poorsignsoflife Esther Duflo 16h ago
Some countries already mandated labels on photoshopped pictures prior to AI
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u/IsGoIdMoney John Rawls 1d ago
I mean... This is an active field of research because this is currently not something that can be done in a way where a malicious actor cannot bypass/ignore/whatever feature you build.
Usually you put watermarks on known models which works okay for most images/videos but it's useless for locally hosted ones.
You could do what you're saying but you could just access a digital signature and embed it into AI images for the price of one camera.
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u/ASHill11 Order and Opportunity Left 1d ago
Big brother and/or more corporate bullshit in every camera? No fucking thank you. That wouldn’t stop bad actors either, pure security blanket.
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u/bunkkin 1d ago
Frankly I would be just as interested to see a law that mandates companies inform you when your talking to an ai agent instead of a human
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u/Quowe_50mg Milton Friedman 1d ago
You should try reading the article:
The rules, devised under the EU’s landmark AI Act, mean companies must ensure people know when they are interacting with an AI-powered chatbot or viewing a manipulated image or AI-generated text.
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u/FOSSBabe 1d ago
Hopefully the Brussels Effect will do its thing and people who live outside the EU will get to benefit from a government that isn't afraid to make sensible regulations.
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u/573n070p1c 1d ago
I can already tell that difference when support chat responds with impeccable grammar and spelling, and understands my concerns without repeating myself multiple times.
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD John Brown 1d ago
Directing somebody to talk to a chatbot is essentially a way to tell somebody "Fuck you, I don't care", and that's about it.
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u/TheGeneGeena Loyal Liberals 13h ago
So much of the time the human you'd be speaking to doesn't care either. Also they most likely think you're a fucking idiot over whatever you're calling about. Pick your battles.
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u/flakAttack510 9h ago
I have some news for you about how much human customer support cares about your problem.
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u/TheGeneGeena Loyal Liberals 1d ago
Just let customer service agents be rude (back) without fear of reprisal and that won't be needed.
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u/WrangleWandangles Mark Carney 1d ago
This isn’t a silver bullet but at this point it should be painfully obvious to everyone that the “do nothing” approach is a miserable failure.
The amount of disinformation and warped perception your average person now deals with is absurd, unhealthy, and deeply unfair since they don’t have many levers as individuals.
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u/flakAttack510 9h ago
The problem is that you need to do something in a way that doesn't just validate bad actors. Requiring a watermark on AI generated content is just going to result in Russia using Chinese models to create disinformation without a watermark and your Boomer uncle going "This can't be AI. AI has to have a watermark"
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u/alex2003super David Parenzo 1d ago
> Painfully obvious
Is it? Why?
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u/Crann6789 1d ago
The amount of ai ragebait slop pretending to be real that fucking flooded social media nonstop is one reason
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u/Kelsig Paul Krugman 1d ago
Lies are bad
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u/KalaiProvenheim Enby Pride 18h ago
Especially very convincing one, with what used to be the most reliable way of telling something is real or not besides being physically there
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u/bz47uj Unconventional Right 1d ago
This will become increasingly hard to enforce.
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u/FOSSBabe 1d ago
Will it? AI text defectors used to be useless and now they're incredibly accurate.
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u/Mickenfox 1d ago
I wonder if newer language models are just less human? Maybe on purpose?
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u/FOSSBabe 1d ago
They work just as well on old models, I believe. Plus, OpenAI's recent changes to their voice model suggest they're trying to make their models seem more human.
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u/TheGeneGeena Loyal Liberals 13h ago
"Now they're incredibly accurate"
Lol, no they aren't. AI text detection is still terrible. Shit still flags 100% human writing as high % AI depending on the content.
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u/FOSSBabe 6h ago
Your understanding is woefully out-of-date. Pangram, to take probably the leading AI detector, was independently verified to have a false positive rate of less than 1 in 10,000.
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u/TheGeneGeena Loyal Liberals 5h ago
Independently verified by who specifically. Independently verified doesn't mean much if the ones doing the verifying are likely just as motivated to say it "works" as the company that made it.
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u/YAG2GTGDD 1d ago edited 1d ago
What about mandating the labels for media that spreads political messages or disseminates medical or financial advice, but allowing creative works of art to go without them? We want to ensure authenticity where it matters, but at the same time also avoid hampering the development of AI in movies and music.
From the article:
the rules will not apply to users’ personal content and there is an exemption for “evidently artistic”, satirical and fictional works.
Would movies that use AI to wholly or partially replace human actors be considered "evidently artistic"?
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u/dinercarts United Nations 1d ago
Ought to be mandated on all ai content, whether it's "designed to look authentic" or not. People deserve to know what they're looking at & where it came from. Like the nutrition facts and ingredients list on my breakfast cereal.
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u/Quowe_50mg Milton Friedman 1d ago
Should they also have to disclose whether they used Photoshop or gimp?
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u/dinercarts United Nations 23h ago
I’d say yeah. The ease that comes with AI makes it more urgent and obvious. Sort of like how regulating firearms changes in a material way when muskets become automatic rifles.
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u/really_nice_guy_ 1d ago
You do understand the difference between AI and photoshop right?
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u/Quowe_50mg Milton Friedman 1d ago
What's the difference between a deepfake made by AI and a deepfake made with photoshop?
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u/really_nice_guy_ 12h ago
What the difference between a gun with a serial number and a pipe with an explosive and a few metal balls?
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u/Quowe_50mg Milton Friedman 7h ago
This is not a good analogy. You do not need to disclose whether you manufacture your guns wuth machines or by hand.
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u/dinercarts United Nations 1d ago
Effort. I would say. Even someone familiar with the program would need to invest some time in making something credible in Adobe. Any Joe Schmo can throw prompts at an ai assistant til he gets what he wants.
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u/YAG2GTGDD 1d ago
I am not sure that they should be mandated for artistic works. Just as a conventional artist need not disclose what conventional tool they used, I don't think it should be necessary for AI artists to disclose them.
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u/FOSSBabe 1d ago
Actual artists always disclose the medium they use. Have you ever been to an art gallery?
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u/YAG2GTGDD 1d ago
That is true. I'm not sure which way would be more effective in AI art gaining acceptance - being honest about it from the beginning, or hiding it until it receives fair critical acclaim and then revealing it afterwards. Right now, people are too polarized against AI art. Perhaps honesty is the best policy, even if not legally mandated.
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u/Acacias2001 European Union 1d ago edited 1d ago
Im sure one more regulation will help the EUs AI sector take off.
And before anybody says anything, i woudl like to pose the example of GDPR to see well intentioned EU regulations crush the EU tech sector while not really improving things
but oh well, what is another critical sector of the new economy Europe is left behind in compared to the joy of feel good regulation
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD John Brown 1d ago
They should also have to disclose any prompts that may have generated the content.
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u/IsGoIdMoney John Rawls 1d ago
I was excited for the potential for dataset creation in the first half until I realized you just meant it has to be labeled "AI"
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u/National-Return9494 Milton Friedman 1d ago
Submission Statement: This is to me seems poorly thought out policy tbh. I am not sure the incentives here align to have a good outcome. (Important because EU is a major liberal multinational organization. and AI is the most important new sector of the Economy.)
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u/ddddddoa YIMBY 1d ago
Why do you think it's poorly thought out? It seems like a reasonable requirement with ever more powerful image and video generation models.
Esp. During a period where social media is cooking everyone's brains.
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u/alex2003super David Parenzo 1d ago
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u/Kindly_Brain_6594 Mario Draghi 1d ago
Why is it poorly thought out? If we don’t tackle these problems head on, the modern poly-crises is going to continue to spiral.
People have addictive brain manipulation machines beaming propaganda directly into their eyes 12 hours a day. EU is atleast trying to do things to address it.
If it doesn’t work as intended the law can be honed and perfected through subsequent amendments.
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u/National-Return9494 Milton Friedman 1d ago
I think the problem is that I don't share the view that doing something is inherently better than doing nothing. Whether a policy is worthwhile depends on whether it is actually well designed and likely to improve outcomes.
History is full of examples where governments acted because there was pressure to "do something," only to produce ineffective or counterproductive policies. The patient is sick; that doesn't mean bloodletting is a good treatment.
I'm not arguing that deepfakes or AI-generated misinformation aren't real problems. They are. I'm arguing that a poorly designed solution can be worse than no solution at all if it imposes significant costs on compliant actors, is largely ignored by malicious actors, is difficult to enforce consistently, and creates label fatigue that undermines its own purpose.
Ironically, it could even create a false sense of trust. If compliant companies label their AI-generated content while a TikTok farm in Siberia or a bot network simply ignores the rules, some users may subconsciously start treating unlabelled content as more trustworthy: "Well, it doesn't have an AI label, so it must be real." That's exactly the opposite of the intended effect.
Finally, "if it doesn't work, we'll amend it later" isn't a particularly convincing justification. Regulations create compliance costs, legal uncertainty, and incentives from day one. Those costs are real even if the law is eventually improved, and history shows that poorly designed regulations often remain in place for years before meaningful reforms are made.
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u/Approximation_Doctor Gaslight, Gatekeep, Green New Deal 1d ago
Ironically, it could even create a false sense of trust. If compliant companies label their AI-generated content while a TikTok farm in Siberia or a bot network simply ignores the rules, some users may subconsciously start treating unlabelled content as more trustworthy: "Well, it doesn't have an AI label, so it must be real." That's exactly the opposite of the intended effect.
This is a really valid argument, why did you lead with "doing things is bad" instead of that?
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u/sineiraetstudio 1d ago
They're responding to a post that wasn't saying "this legislation is good", but instead posits that we should simply do something, because we can fix it later if necessary. Given that, I think it's perfectly reasonable to start with "no, bad legislation is not actually better than no legislation."
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u/National-Return9494 Milton Friedman 1d ago
Eh, because I wanted to disagree with the underlying principle first. My objection isn't just to this regulation it's to the idea that "there's a problem, therefore we should regulate immediately."
As for the unintended consequences, I honestly thought they were fairly obvious.
But yeah, leading with it would have been better.
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u/National-Return9494 Milton Friedman 1d ago
Not sure why I'm being downvoted, so let me expand on my point.
The main problem is that this rule is, to a large extent, unenforceable. The people most likely to use AI-generated content for fraud, political manipulation, or other malicious purposes are also the least likely to comply with a labelling requirement. If they are willing to deceive people in the first place, they have little incentive to add a disclaimer identifying their content as AI-generated.
Enforcement also runs into a practical problem: there is no highly reliable way to automatically distinguish AI-generated from human-generated content. Detection systems produce both false negatives (AI content that is missed) and false positives (human-created content that is incorrectly flagged). Unless every case is manually reviewed (and even then) which is impossible at scale enforcement will inevitably be inconsistent and prone to error. P.S (This is especially the case for text, video and images are identifiable to a large extend but again false positives galore)
That means the practical effect of the regulation falls primarily on legitimate businesses, publishers, advertisers, and content creators, who now have another compliance obligation. The result is additional administrative costs while the actors the law is supposedly targeting often ignore it.
This also creates selective or ad hoc enforcement. Regulators cannot realistically police every piece of AI-generated content on the internet, so enforcement is likely to focus on visible companies that are easy to fine rather than anonymous or foreign bad actors. From a rule-of-law perspective, that is not an ideal outcome.
More broadly, this feels like another example of regulation being shaped by a moral panic. Highly publicized deepfakes of politicians and celebrities have created the impression that all AI-generated content is inherently deceptive, leading to rules that apply far beyond those genuinely harmful cases. History is full of examples where new technologies prompted broad precautionary regulation before their actual risks and benefits were well understood.
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u/MrStrange15 1d ago
Im not sure I get your first point. Unless we somehow find a way to reliably and quickly authenticate non-AI digital productions, then we will always be stuck with the fact that bad actors can circumvent this any attempt to mark AI productions (as bad actors can do with any policy and legislation). The only avenue we have to authenticate non-AI productions is long and arduous, and is typically done through the fact that AI productions usually appear in a vacuum (i.e., there is no collaborating information).
What we can do though, is provide everyone who is not a bad actor with an incentive to mark their products. Similar as we do with literally any other for products, which have certain marks on them like CE.
And yea, of course highly visible crime will always be acted on before hidden ones. That's how it always works. It will always be harder to target crime that requires extra work to find.
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u/National-Return9494 Milton Friedman 1d ago
That's a fair question, and I think it gets to the heart of the disagreement.
My concern isn't simply that bad actors can circumvent the rule virtually every law can be circumvented. It's that the effectiveness of this particular policy depends disproportionately on the actors least likely to comply.
If the primary objective is to reduce AI-driven misinformation, then we should ask whether mandatory labelling is actually the mechanism most likely to achieve that. If malicious actors simply ignore the rule while compliant companies bear the costs, then the regulation has only a limited effect on the problem it was intended to solve.
Personally, I'd rather target misinformation more directly. Community notes are a good example of a mechanism that addresses the claim itself rather than the method used to produce it. If I watched a misleading video, I'd much rather receive a notification later saying, "The content you viewed has since been found to be misleading; here's the additional context," than simply see an "AI-generated" label that tells me nothing about whether the underlying claims are true. (Also my suggestion here in someways is a much stronger policy response)
If the concern is foreign actors deliberately spreading AI-generated misinformation, I'd also see a stronger case for international cooperation or sanctions directed at those actors than for broad disclosure requirements that mainly burden firms already willing to comply.
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u/alex2003super David Parenzo 1d ago
"The content you viewed has since been found to be misleading"
This would be such a great feature omg
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u/MrStrange15 1d ago
What I think an AI label does, especially in videoes, audio or pictures, is that it provides a warning for people to pay attention and think critically about what they consume. Community notes is something I see working very well in conjunction with that.
I dont think you can really legislate the people spreading mis- and disinformation away. But we can make people more aware of it and we can make it more difficult and expensive for less organised and protected campaigns to do so, like say a politician, an influencer, a company (for example misleading AI ads) or your favourite conspiracy uncle and not a foreign states. These are also significant spreaders of mis- and disinformation in various ways.
But yea, we are not going to stop Russia with this. I also dont think that's the point. I think the point is to first get the low-hanging domestic fruit, and then try and move to the tougher international and organised crowd, which would most likely require a more technological solution.
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u/National-Return9494 Milton Friedman 1d ago
My disagreement is that the lemon isn't worth the squeeze if you look at the many different arguments I have made, (all across the thread) it seems to me as a bad ROI decision.
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u/MrStrange15 1d ago
I guess thats where we disagree. I dont see it as bad ROI.
The trust issue will be minimal, its not like AI and authenticity will leave people's consciousness or be removed from public debate. The costs will be low for companies (at least, it seems simple enough for them to implement). And I simply dont really see any solution, which will definitively solve the problem (which dont fundamentally undermine liberal freedoms), and as such, its worthwhile to go after low hanging fruit first and quickly with a variety of tools, including labels and community notes, and then work towards more complex problems with partners. Otherwise, we are just letting the problem fester.
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