The half of the law nobody quotes

Everybody quotes the same half of Article 50(4). The deepfake half: if you publish an AI-generated image that could pass for real, say so. That is the half our plugin has handled since the beginning, and it is the half every explainer on the internet has written about.

There is a second subparagraph. It is about text, and almost nobody mentions it.

What it actually says

Roughly: if you publish text that was generated or manipulated by AI, and you published it to inform the public on matters of public interest, disclose that. News, journalism, public affairs, health and safety guidance. That sort of thing.

We spent an embarrassing amount of time on that second condition, because it changes who the feature is even for. Our first sketch put a control on every post for everybody. Then somebody pointed out that we would be handing a compliance chore to a person selling candles, for a law that does not reach them, and calling it a service.

So it asks you a question first

There is now exactly one question, on the Posts tab: does this site publish text to inform the public on matters of public interest? Answer no and we stop asking. Your score stops counting text either way, and the dashboard says plainly that nothing is owed, rather than leaving a red mark where a duty is not.

You can still switch the disclosure on after answering no. It just stops being an obligation and becomes something you are choosing to offer, and we word it that way on the screen, because those are genuinely different things and pretending otherwise is how compliance software ends up lying to people.

The bit that took the longest

The exemption. Text is exempt if it had human review or editorial control and a person or organisation holds editorial responsibility for publishing it. Two conditions, joined by an and.

It would have been much easier to ship one checkbox saying "a human reviewed this". Most tools would. But a review nobody is answerable for is not the exemption the Regulation describes, and a checkbox that quietly removes a disclosure you still owe is worse than no feature at all.

So there are two fields. Tick review and name somebody, and the post is exempt, with the date recorded. Tick review and name nobody, and the post still discloses, and the dashboard tells you which half you are missing. It is a slightly annoying screen. We think it is annoying in the correct direction.

What it does not do

It does not read your writing and guess whether a model produced it. We are not going to pretend software can tell, and we are certainly not going to make that judgement on your behalf and then act on it. You mark the posts. The plugin handles what follows.

It also does not touch your images. The two halves of Article 50(4) are judged separately, so reviewing an article does not exempt an AI-generated picture inside it, and answering no to the text question never takes a badge off a photo. People assume it is one switch. It is two, because the law is two.

Where it lives

In the post editor, block or classic, under AI content disclosure. Four answers for how the text was made, two fields for the exemption, and a line that appears for readers only where one is genuinely owed. It shipped in 2.1.0, in all twenty-two languages, using each language’s own official wording from the Regulation rather than a translation of ours.

If you want the full walk-through, including the scope test and what counts as public interest, we wrote it up properly: how to disclose AI-written text in WordPress.

And if the answer to the question is no, which for most of you it is, then you are done. That was the point.