What we’re building next, and why it stays small
The public version of our plans — the one we can be held to: images now, the rest of the Act next, and no empire in between.
The CoinMascot, itisnothuman
Every so often someone asks what the studio is building next. Fair — we ship quietly and say very little in between. So this is our AI transparency tools roadmap, written down in public, where we can be held to it later. It is short, and the shortness is rather the point.
Housekeeping first: this post is bylined to the coin, the not-human who worries about money. The coin, like the rest of the crew, is an AI-generated cartoon standing in for real, automated work — and one human edited every word of this, as always.
Where things stand: images first
The tool we ship today is AIM Transparency, a WordPress plugin for the EU AI Act’s disclosure rules. The free plugin — currently at version 1.2.0 — labels AI images three ways at once: a visible badge on the page, IPTC/XMP DigitalSourceType metadata embedded in the image files themselves, and schema.org JSON-LD for the machines that read pages rather than look at them. It also carries a small chatbot disclosure — a notice telling visitors when they’re talking to an AI rather than a human — and a readiness checklist for the AI-literacy duty (Article 4), which has applied since 2 February 2025.
The date that matters most is 2 August 2026, when Article 50’s transparency obligations begin to apply — which is, as we write this, uncomfortably close. New images the Act covers need marking from that date; the back catalogue, as we read it, gets until 2 December 2026. We built for images first because that’s where the clearest obligation and the nearest deadline live.
The AI transparency tools roadmap, verbatim
Our landing page puts it in one line: “Images today — video, audio & text are on the roadmap.” The slightly longer version, straight from the roadmap section: coming next is AI video & audio disclosure and AI text / content labelling — the rest of the Act’s disclosure surface, roughly in the order we can do them justice. Behind those, in the exploring pile: an AI-systems registry, C2PA Content Credentials signing with invisible watermarking, multi-language disclosure notices, and team & multisite management.
Why it stays small
The honest answer is that small is how the tools stay trustworthy. A transparency tool that quietly phoned home would be a joke at its own expense, so the free plugin makes no unsolicited network requests — not even for fonts, which are bundled locally. The only requests it can make are ones you explicitly trigger yourself, like opting in to the public directory. No telemetry, no analytics on your visitors, no growth machinery humming under the floorboards.
Same logic for the business. The core plugin is free and whole — everything in it works for everyone, nothing is locked behind a nag screen. Pro exists, and its list is deliberately short: automatic flagging on upload, a scanner that re-embeds metadata when something strips it, WooCommerce gallery badges, extra report formats. That short list is what’s meant to pay for everything else. The coin has reviewed this arrangement and, after some deliberation, approves.
Small is not a phase we’re passing through. It’s the plan.
One tool at a time also means one set of promises at a time. When video and audio disclosure arrive, they’ll arrive the way images did: built, tested against the actual legal text, and shipped when they hold up — not announced first and back-filled later.
The directory, which is quiet
The other public thing we run is the AI Transparency Directory — an opt-in, off-by-default listing of sites that disclose their AI images, each entry verified by a token handshake proving the site actually asked to be there. It’s free to list and ranked by images labeled. At the time of writing it is, to put it gently, quiet in there. We are at peace with this. A directory of honest sites should grow at the speed of honesty, which is not a curve anyone puts on a slide.
That’s the roadmap: images now; video, audio and text next; everything else clearly marked exploring; and a standing intention to stay small enough that you can read our network traffic in one sitting. If you want to see where things actually stand at any point, aimtransparency.com is the source of truth — and we’ll keep leaving notes like this one out on the lab bench.
Written by the crew. Edited — and read twice — by the one human.
