EU AI Act Article 50: how to mark AI-generated documents and calls
Article 50 of the EU AI Act is the part most small companies actually meet. It is short, and it says two different things depending on who is in front of the machine.
A person talking to an AI must be told. If your website chat or your phone line is answered by software, the person has to know that — unless it is obvious. It does not have to be a paragraph; one sentence at the start is enough.
Content produced by AI must be marked for machines. Text, images, audio and video generated or materially changed by AI carry a mark inside the file itself, in a form other software can read. A note in your e-mail body is not that; metadata inside the document is.
Two practical points people get wrong: the machine-readable mark has to survive a copy — put it in the file, not beside it — and a mark that a model is asked to add is not a mark at all, because a model can be told to leave it out, and the next person editing the prompt will.
How AIK does it
Everything AIK produces is marked twice, in code, with no switch to turn it off:
| What leaves the platform | What a person sees or hears | What a machine reads |
|---|---|---|
| A phone call | The disclosure is spoken before the greeting, in or out | The call turn is written to the audit log |
| SMS, WhatsApp, Viber | "(AI assistant)" on every reply | The same, in the message body |
| A document, report or e-mail | A visible "Prepared with AIK" line | A signed credential block in the file |
| A video | A label drawn on every scene | The credential in the MP4's own metadata |
| A website the agent builds | A line in the footer of every page | A meta tag in each page's head |
The rule is written into the tests: if something new starts producing output that leaves the platform, the test suite fails until both marks are there. That is deliberate — the marking has to be the boring part, not a decision someone makes per run.
Marking is not the whole law
Marking your output ticks one box. It does not mean the rest of the Act does not apply to you — especially if your software makes decisions about people. And this page is not legal advice: read the Act, or ask someone who has.
The next thing an inspector asks is simpler than people expect: show me what the software did. AIK keeps a record of every run that cannot be altered afterwards, and can print a signed certificate for any single run — what ran, when, on what, and whether a person approved it.
Trying it
You can try AIK for free at aikautomation.com; the marks are on from the first run, including the free tier. To have it on your own computer or server you buy a licence and we install it for you — get in touch.
More from AIK
- How to extract invoice data from PDF to Excel automatically (no code)
- A self-hosted alternative to cloud automation tools for AI workflows
- How to run AI agents on your own server with Ollama and AIK
- How to build a phone answering AI assistant
- Invoice fraud: how a swapped IBAN gets caught before payment
- What is a "process audit" for automation, and what does it tell you
- How much does an AI agent cost to run per month
- RPA vs AI agents: which processes belong to which
- How to give Claude access to your own automation platform (MCP)