Provider or deployer: which role carries which duty
Under Article 50 of the EU AI Act the provider carries the machine-readable marking duty and the deployer carries the disclosure duty. A studio generating episodes on someone else's model is a deployer: it must disclose, and it cannot mark. Both roles are bound by the timing rule in paragraph 5. As of 2026-09-12.
| Clause | Role | Duty | When it bites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Article 50(1) | Provider | Tell people they are interacting with an AI system | At design time 50(1) |
| Article 50(2) | Provider | Mark synthetic output in a machine-readable format, detectable as generated | At generation 50(2) |
| Article 50(3) | Deployer | Inform people exposed to emotion recognition or biometric categorisation | At exposure 50(3) |
| Article 50(4) sub. 1 | Deployer | Disclose deep-fake image, audio or video; narrowed for creative work | At publication 50(4) |
| Article 50(4) sub. 2 | Deployer | Disclose AI text informing the public on matters of public interest | At publication 50(4) |
| Article 50(5) | Both | Give the information clearly, at the latest at first interaction or exposure | At first contact 50(5) |
Inclusion rule. Rows are the paragraphs of Article 50 that impose a duty on a named role. Paragraphs that only qualify or exempt a duty are written into the relevant row rather than given a row of their own. Order. Clause order, as the article is numbered.
1Why the split matters for anyone generating video
The two duties attach to different moments and to different parties, and that is the part most often collapsed in summaries. Marking happens inside the system that produces the file. Disclosure happens where the file meets an audience. A production company that types a prompt into a hosted model never touches the marking layer, so no amount of care on its side satisfies paragraph 2; equally, a model vendor that marks every frame has done nothing about paragraph 4, because the vendor is not the one publishing the episode.
That split has a practical consequence when picking a generation tool. The marking duty is discharged by the tool, so it is a question to put to the vendor: what is written into the file, in what format, and is it still there after the file is re-encoded. The disclosure duty is discharged by the publisher, so it is a question about the cut itself: where the notice sits, whether it survives the platform's own re-encode, and whether it is present on every derivative that gets posted.
Where the same organisation both builds the system and publishes the output, both duties land on it, and they still have to be satisfied separately. Marking is machine-facing and invisible to the audience. Disclosure is audience-facing and, for creative work, narrowed by the wording in paragraph 4 to a statement that generated content is present.
2What the article does not settle
Article 50 names no watermarking standard, no file format and no wording for a disclosure. Paragraph 2 ties the technical side to what is feasible and to the acknowledged state of the art; paragraph 7 leaves the method to codes of practice, with an implementing act held back in case a code is found inadequate. Anyone reading the article for a checklist of approved techniques will not find one in the text.
The article is also silent on who verifies compliance in a chain with several parties, and on what happens when a file is marked by the provider and then stripped by an intermediate tool. Those gaps are not defects in the summary above; they are gaps in the instrument as written, and they are the reason the role question has to be answered per production rather than once.
3Sources
Every row above points at the matching fact row on the Article 50 page, where the clause text and its check date are recorded. This page adds no facts of its own; it rearranges the ones held there.