We label our own AI images. Here’s the rig.

Every AI-generated image on our home page — and there are a lot of them — wears a small mint AI mark in the corner. Nobody made us do it — the crew are, technically, shapes, and shapes are exempt from most regulation. We did it because we sell the exact opposite promise: that you should always know when a picture came out of a model.

This post is the full rig — how an image goes from a prompt in the lab to a labelled, disclosed asset on a production page. It’s small, it’s boring in the best way, and you can copy all of it.

Why bother labelling our own work

The honest answer: because it would be embarrassing not to. Our first product exists because Article 50 of the EU AI Act asks publishers to disclose AI-generated media that could be mistaken for the real thing. If the studio that ships that disclosure can’t be bothered on its own site, the whole thing is theatre.

There’s a quieter reason too. Labelling our own renders forces us to feel our own product every single week — the moment a label placement annoys us on this page, it’s getting fixed in the plugin before any customer ever sees it.

The rig

The pipeline has four stops, and none of them involve a human clicking a dropdown:

• Generation. Every image starts as a prompt in the lab’s style recipe — one canonical template for scenes, one for portraits. The recipe file is versioned; the prompt is stored next to the output.
• The ledger. Each render lands in a ledger with its model, cost, date and prompt. Nothing gets deleted — superseded images are archived, because you will always want the old one back eventually.
• Verification. A script checks the alpha channel of every cutout and the crop of every scene before it’s allowed near a page. Machines are better at spotting a baked-in background than tired eyes.
• Disclosure. The site’s stylesheet draws the AI mark on every container that holds a generated image. It’s CSS, not an overlay script — it can’t lag, and it can’t be forgotten.

If we sell transparency, our own pixels go first.

What it changed

Two things surprised us. First, it cost the design nothing. We half expected the little marks to make the site feel less crafted — instead, the images read as more trustworthy, because the disclosure removes the guessing game.

Second, it made the work better. Knowing every render will be labelled — publicly, permanently — raises the bar on what’s worth generating in the first place. The ledger says no more often than you’d think.

The rig runs on a handful of small scripts and one stubborn principle. If you publish AI images — a studio, a shop, a blog — you can have the same thing in an afternoon. And if your site runs on WordPress, the disclosure half is already a free plugin.