EU AI Act Article 50 requires providers and deployers of certain AI
systems to disclose that a user is interacting with an AI, to mark synthetic content,
and to read or categorise biometrics only with consent and disclosure. The obligations
are limited-risk, not high-risk, but they apply to every system the Act touches
that meets the triggers.
What Article 50 covers
Art 50(1) — providers of AI systems intended to interact directly with natural persons must inform those persons that they are interacting with an AI, unless this is obvious from context.
Art 50(2) — providers of synthetic content (text, audio, image, video) generated by AI must mark it in a machine-readable way that is effective, interoperable, robust and reliable as far as technically feasible.
Art 50(3) — providers of AI systems that generate or manipulate image, audio or video constituting a deepfake must disclose that the content has been artificially generated or manipulated.
Art 50(4) — providers of AI systems that generate synthetic text published to inform the public must mark it in a machine-readable way.
Art 50(5) — deployers of emotion-recognition or biometric-categorisation systems must inform the exposed persons.
Why it matters in practice
Article 50 is the only Article most "AI users" will ever interact with directly. A
chatbot on a website, a deepfake in a news feed, an image with a synthetic provenance
claim — these are all in scope. Fines are up to 3% of global annual turnover or
€15M, whichever is higher.
What CSOAI measures for Article 50
Chatbot disclosure — does the system identify itself as AI in the first user-facing message? Measured against the AI Act frozen-split harness.
Biometric / emotion inference disclosure — if the system reads emotion, does it disclose that to the user?
The free Article 50 Passport
The Article 50 Passport is a free signed
record that documents your system's transparency posture in about two minutes. The
record is signed with our public key and verifiable offline. It is not a certification;
it is a self-assessment evidence artifact. Auditors and counsel can recompute from
the published harness.
Boundary
Nothing on this page is legal advice. The measurements are the evidence layer; the
legal interpretation is its own layer (notified bodies, regulators, counsel). For a
binding view of Article 50's application to your system, engage a lawyer.