If your WordPress site publishes AI-generated or AI-edited images, the EU AI Act's transparency rules start applying to you on 2 August 2026. Here's what the law asks in plain English, who it covers, and exactly how to comply — for free.
Practical guide · last reviewed July 2026
The EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) entered into force in August 2024, with obligations phasing in over several years. Article 50 is the part about transparency: making sure people know when they're dealing with AI, and that AI-generated content can be recognised as such. Its transparency obligations become applicable on 2 August 2026.
Article 50 splits into duties on two kinds of party: providers (who build/supply the AI system) and deployers (who use it — that's most WordPress site owners).
If you use an AI tool (Midjourney, DALL·E, Firefly, Stable Diffusion, and so on) to generate or edit images that you then publish — on a blog, a news site, a shop, a portfolio — you're acting as a deployer, and Article 50(4)'s disclosure duty is aimed at you. The obligation is strongest for "deep fakes": image, audio or video content that's been artificially generated or manipulated to resemble real people, objects, places or events.
It's an EU regulation, but its reach is broad: it applies where the AI system's output is used within the EU, so non-EU sites with EU audiences are generally caught too. Purely artistic, satirical or fictional work has lighter, context-appropriate disclosure — but "we're a small blog" is not, by itself, an exemption.
If your site runs a chatbot or AI assistant, visitors must be told they're interacting with AI, not a human. On WordPress: a small persistent disclosure notice near the chat widget (AIM Transparency ships a notice + an [aim_ai_notice] shortcode for this).
AI-generated audio, image, video and text should be marked in a machine-readable way (e.g. embedded metadata / provenance) so detection tools can recognise it. Primarily a provider duty, but embedding the mark in the files you host is good practice and future-proofs you. On WordPress: write the IPTC/XMP DigitalSourceType tag into the image file, plus schema.org JSON-LD on the page.
As a deployer publishing AI-generated or manipulated visual content (especially deep fakes), you must clearly disclose that it's artificial. On WordPress: a visible badge on the image ("AI Generated" / "AI Modified") that a human can plainly see.
Already in force: organisations must take steps so staff dealing with AI have a sufficient level of AI literacy. On WordPress: keep a simple record — which AI tools you use, who's responsible, a review cadence. (AIM Transparency includes an Article 4 checklist and a readiness score.)
The AI Act carries real teeth. Failure to meet the transparency obligations can lead to administrative fines of up to €15 million, or 3% of total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher (figures vary with the specific infringement and are set by national authorities). The point isn't the maximum — it's that "we didn't know" won't be a defence after 2 August 2026.
AIM Transparency is a free WordPress plugin built for exactly this. You flag an image as AI, and it applies all three disclosure layers at once — the visible badge, the embedded IPTC/XMP metadata, and the schema.org JSON-LD — across your galleries, featured images and content, on any standard theme. It adds the chatbot notice and an Article 4 readiness checklist too. The core is free forever; Pro adds automatic detection on upload, more image formats, a library scanner and compliance reports.
If you publish AI-generated or AI-manipulated images to an audience (particularly deep-fake-style content), Article 50(4) asks you to disclose it, from 2 August 2026. Small size doesn't exempt you; genuinely artistic/satirical work gets context-appropriate, lighter disclosure.
Generally yes if the AI output is used within the EU or reaches EU users — the Act's scope is not limited to EU-registered companies.
They serve different parts of Article 50: the visible badge is the human disclosure (50(4)); the embedded IPTC/XMP mark + JSON-LD make it machine-readable (50(2)). Doing both is the robust approach — and a visible badge still works even when a platform strips metadata on re-upload.
You risk administrative fines (up to €15M / 3% of global turnover for transparency breaches) and reputational harm. Acting early is cheap; retrofitting under enforcement pressure isn't.
Install AIM Transparency, flag your AI images, and the badge, embedded metadata and JSON-LD are applied automatically. Free forever for the core disclosure stack.
Download the free plugin