AI-Generated Ads Now Require Disclosure in the EU: What's Actually Required

As of August 2nd, EU law requires you to disclose AI-generated or edited ad creative, and if your agency hasn't told you yet, that's a problem. 

In this episode of the Google Ads Unleashed Podcast, host Jeremy breaks down exactly what the EU AI Act Article 50 means for Google Ads advertisers. Which assets are affected, from Performance Max and demand gen creatives to Merchant Center product images, and how to manually label AI-generated content across Google Ads, Asset Studio, and Merchant Center before it becomes a compliance liability. 

Learn why the disclosure obligation sits entirely with the advertiser rather than Google, why non-compliance risks fines of up to €15 million or 3% of global turnover, and what Young & Digital is already doing to get client accounts compliant. 

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

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Do you know the feeling when you're looking at an ad and you can't actually tell anymore if it's AI or not? The European Union really has an issue with that and has taken umbbridge to that and has seen this coming that this may actually turn into a problem a couple of years down the line after uh the first sort of let's say waves of AI generated imagery and content has been sweeping through the internet. So as of the 2nd of August of this year, a new EU law is now live and it requires that you disclose when a piece of content is AI generated or edited and when it reaches EU users include an at creative and anything else regarding creative non-compliant clients can mean fines up to 15 million or 3% of worldwide annual turnover. So, this is quite serious and I'm going to talk about what this means for you today and what you can do in order to stay compliant. Welcome back to Google Ads Unleash, guys. I hope everyone is doing fabulously this Monday. Today, bit of a boring but very important topic, compliance with EU's AI article uh or EU AI act sorry article 50 which came into regulation last Sunday on the 2nd of August. So basically according to um the EU at creative now falls under the AI generate manipulated content uh of this act and any ad or asset that is AI generated or AI influenced that is running in the EU the UK excluded for now uh I guess thanks to Brexit. uh must carry an explicit AI label. This also includes India and the state of New York um from what we gather from the uh information. This includes image ads, video ads, performance max assets, search assets, uh images in Merchant Center, essentially anything that visual that's been touched by AI. And it's not just uh limited to Google Ads itself. This meta has the exact same thing and is undergoing that at the moment as well. And if you think, "Wow, I haven't really heard of this." Well, to be honest, we've not really had a lot of time. So, apparently, this uh law has been worked on in the last 2 years. It only came into effect last Sunday, but um it hasn't actually been long since Google has been starting to roll out its response since the 9th of July only. And maybe you've spotted it by accident, but there hasn't really been any particular sort of attention in my opinion in the UI or in the communication from Google from Google itself that actually what this means for us and what we need to do. So basically there is now two things that you need to do going forward um and to sort of communicate whether a piece of creative has been uh generated or edited with AI. The first one is a consumerf facing way which um is a a how this ad was made section in inside the my ad center which you reach via the three dot menu when someone clicks on an ad across search YouTube and discover and it tells whether AI played a role in creating this ad um or on creative labels. So um advertisers are actually now required uh going forward or can do this. This happens automatically when you generate an asset using uh Gemini or asset studio uh with AI, but you can also add this in the uh anywhere in the in the picture or in in the asset that you add an AI label directly to the image of the video creators without um actually tripping uh Google's uh policy regarding text overlay or watermarks etc. Um so this labeling is a self declaration essentially that uh advertisers can now activate manually. and Google doesn't actually independently verify these. So the accuracy obligation sits entirely with the advertiser. Okay. So this is sort of how it looks like uh to to the to the consumer and this is um what Google has actually built in order to make this identifiable to the consumer. Now where this control lives, how you actually do this right now is pretty straightforward albeit really really tedious. So the AI label disclosure um is now rolled out across Google ads, merchant center and even ads editor and you can check all those platforms separately if you run uh um if if you run ads you know let's say you're just lead genen and of course you don't have merchant center and for Google ads specifically I found the easiest way is to just go into asset studio and to bulk edit all of the images and videos that you have in there and say you basically can just takeick it very easily and then um a blue uh label may appear that you can select where you definitely say whether this uh content piece has been touched by AI either generated or edited. Um it's a bit of a pain in the ass to be honest with you, but I think um it's sort of the best solution that you have at the moment. And you uh can also um maybe even involve your client if you want. And in my opinion, if you're not 100% certain at this stage, I would probably uh sort of recommend that you on the side of caution and just do it anyway. Okay. Uh you can also go manually into any image asset on search or you can also go manually into performance max for instance or demand gen to label all of the ads by uh by hand. Okay. And the