Tightened regulations joined early-mover New York when they took effect this weekend. But what do they mean right now for advertisers? And are tighter global standards now an inevitability?

New AI disclosure laws are landing worldwide – but what do they mean for marketers? (Unsplash)

Last weekend, Article 50 of the EU’s landmark AI Act came into force.

Under it, those who make and use certain kinds of AI systems now have new and expanded transparency obligations. Now, they’ll have to inform users when they’re interacting with an AI system, or when they’re exposing to deepfakes, emotion recognition, or biometric categorization tools. In other words, artificially generated content designed to look real must be labeled as such.

On the same day that Article 50 came into force, it was joined by the California AI Transparency Act, which imposes disclosure requirements on, among others, popular generative AI systems. It requires those providers to offer free AI detection tools, include an option for “manifest disclosure” for content generated by their software and embed “latent disclosure” that makes AI content identifiable as such, even when licensed to third parties.

Those new laws follow early movers like the state of New York, whose synthetic performer disclosure law came into force in June, ahead of the more sweeping Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, expected to take effect on the first day of 2027.

Laws elsewhere in the world, combined with pressure from brands and trade groups, together amount to what one ad agency exec – Redscout chief executive Michael Keany – today calls “2026, the year of disclosure by default.”

What has changed for advertisers?

Under the EU’s Article 50, the crux of the matter is that advertisers (among other parties) now have to disclose when AI has generated or manipulated depictions of people, places or objects that appear real. Failure to do so can result in fines of up to €15m or up to 3% of global annual revenue.

Provisions and punishments will vary across jurisdictions, but Gabrielle Robitaille, director of policy and AI & privacy lead at trade body the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), says that it’s clear we’ve reached a tipping point, following which global lawmakers and other standards-setters will not be slow to follow the EU, New York and California. Robitaille compares the moment we’re in now to GDPR in 2018: “There was a legal framework, but many of the practical questions about implementation still had to be worked through. We’re now at a similar inflection point.”

The organizations that the WFA represents – brand-side marketing departments – have been clamoring for a level of “certainty,” Robitaille says, with clear, enforceable rules, “a board-level issue.”

But that’s not to say the matter is now settled. The New York synthetic personas statute has faced criticism for its specificity and enforceability. Lawyers will begin to develop a clearer sense of EU and California laws as they are enforced. As such, Robitaille says that “the legal certainty that global brands need … won’t happen overnight, but will evolve over the next few years.” She adds: “The next few weeks and months will be critical as regulators publish guidance, enforcement begins and industry develops common practices.”

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How is the industry reacting?

According to WFA research, 82% of multinational advertisers believe transparency is essential to protect their brands’ reputation – and, even before this latest raft of regulation landed, 67% had already developed internal rules for disclosure around AI-generated marketing creative.

On the agency side, too, further clarity on regulation is being welcomed by many insofar as it starts to clear up the uncertainty that has swirled around disclosure for at least a few years. Redscout’s Michael Keany says that while current regulation “may be a little behind the jagged frontier,” it’s still useful. “If you look at some of those components that they’re going after, it is managing things that, if left unregulated, could lead to really unpleasant things… I like good regulation because it provides, if nothing else, health and hygiene around the worst parts of the market.”

For Keany, tightening regulation will only hasten a necessary – and exciting – evolution in the industry’s use of AI. “AI round one was about operating efficiencies and everybody loving LLMs for research. Round two is about authenticity and trust – and some economic returns. There’s a tiny bit of tension between perhaps the office of the CFO looking to generate operating efficiencies and the office of the CMO trying to figure out how to generate more demand in a more cacophonous, inauthentic, sloppy world.”

You might expect the AI production companies to be less keen on ratcheting regulation. But Silverside AI, arguably the most famous AI production studio in the world since it made Coca-Cola’s 2025 AI Christmas spot, is a surprisingly vocal cheerleader for regulation. “AI is a medium and it shouldn’t be a dirty little secret,” co-founder Johnny Rohrbach tells The Drum.

“Consumers are incredibly intelligent,” says Rohrbach. “When you try to hide things from them, they’re going to find out about it. You put yourself in a really unfortunate position when you’re not upfront about the use of AI, because you’re trying to hide something. In the ethos of every single brand we work with, honesty and transparency are absolutely paramount. So why would you hide it? If you’re going to try and hide it, it’s ultimately going to bite you later.”

The upshot, for Rohrbach, is that the regulatory dam-breaking is “an exciting moment for the industry” and he expects rigorous global disclosure standards within a couple of years. “It’s coming, it’s just a matter of when, not if.”

The onward path for regulation

New laws may usher in a new era of a new era of disclosure and transparency, but we remain at the start of that new era. For the WFA’s Robitaille, the priority is that this next phase takes advertisers beyond “regulatory uncertainty.”

For the most part, says Robitaille, the current crop of laws hasn’t been designed to regulate advertising content per se, but to protect against public harms like misinformation. So, as they’re implemented, Robitaille calls on“advertising, advertisers, agencies, platforms and self-regulatory organizations” to “work together to ensure they’re implemented in a way that is both meaningful for consumers and workable for businesses.”

To that end, Robitaille praises the EU Article 50’s recognition “that not every use of AI in advertising requires disclosure,” leaving room for regulatory bodies and internal standards to find their own reasonable bars and red lines. WFA research, for example, finds greater sensitivity and demand for transparency in the case of human likenesses, perhaps indicating a need for greater rigor. “The priority should be meaningful transparency and not blanket labeling,” says Robitaille. “If every advert that has used AI somewhere in the creative process carries a label, consumers will quickly experience disclosure fatigue and those labels will lose their value.”

As ever in the advertising world, the path this takes will be decided by a dance between self-regulation and lawmaking. Robitaille hopes as much as possible can be settled by the former. Others may be more skeptical. Jonathan Hardy, professor of communications and media at the London College of Communication and co-author of an upcoming book that touches on AI disclosure regulations, says that the UK, in particular, “has been really complacent” thus far.

Speaking to The Drum before the recent wave of regulation dropped, Hardy said: “There definitely needs to be labeling for AI-assisted [work] that goes beyond the narrow terms that have been set so far. It fits a pattern of the industry desperately trying to narrow and compartmentalize and risk-manage regulation.”