SenseDefend

Synthetic-media instruments, by article and effective date

Two distinctions the record keeps insisting on

These pages set out the two distinctions that decide how the rest of the record is read. Both are drawn in the text itself, and both are routinely collapsed in commentary about it. As of 2026-09-12.

The two collapses that make transparency rules look simplerSummaries collapse provider into deployer, and visible marking into machine-readable marking. Both collapses make the rules easier to state and harder to act on, because the obligations that remain after the collapse belong to nobody in particular.What is lost in compressionOnly the textKept apart in the textProvider duties, Deployer duties,Visible marks, Machine-readable marksBoth listsSurvives bothSomething must be disclosedOnly a summaryWhat a summary leavesA general duty with no ownerThe middle column is all a short summary keeps
Fig. 1 Both distinctions are drawn in the text itself. Neither is an invention of this record.

Provider and deployer is the first. The party that builds and places a system on the market carries obligations that the party using it does not, and a company can be both in different arrangements. A production house generating footage with a purchased tool is usually a deployer, and the obligations that follow are narrower and easier to meet than the ones it might assume it has.

Visible against machine-readable is the second. The two serve different audiences: a viewer who should know what they are watching, and a platform or detector that needs to recognise the content automatically. A product that provides one is not thereby providing the other, and the text does not treat them as substitutes.

Both pages exist because the collapse happens in good faith. Summaries have to be short, and the shortest summary of a transparency rule loses exactly the part a compliance team needs.

1The explainers

  • Three kinds of marking — One word covers three mechanisms with different failure modes.
  • Keeping a record — Questions about a published asset arrive long after it shipped.
  • Reading a plan table — A plan table is written to help somebody choose a tier.
  • Reading a system card — A card published for review is written by people expecting to be quoted back.
  • Reading an API reference — A reference is written for somebody who will notice if it is wrong, which makes its types and its stated defaults unusually trustworthy.
  • Reading a support article — A support page is written because somebody asked, by people who will be corrected by the next person who asks.
  • Reading a repository — A repository publishes files and the terms they travel under.
  • Omission and statement — A register can record what a page says and what a page was read for and did not say.
  • Recording silence — An empty cell and a documented absence look the same and mean opposite things.
  • Why rows carry dates — A fact without a date is a claim.
  • Defaults decide it — Documentation describes what a tool can be made to do.
  • Per-call controls — A value carried by one request exists for the duration of that request.
  • Who holds the lever — An operator, a budget holder and an integrator can each control what output carries, and they rarely speak to each other about it.
  • What a transcode costs — A platform that transcodes keeps the content and rebuilds everything around it.
  • Safe areas and crops — Vertical delivery reframes material for different surfaces, and safe areas differ.
  • Thresholds — Reading an embedded signal is not a lookup.
  • Verify the route — What a delivered asset carries is decided by the pipeline it travelled, and a pipeline is a small, stable thing that can be tested once.
  • Version fields — Model behaviour changes between versions and interfaces stop showing which version ran.
  • Re-render is not repair — Where the published route to changing a file is to generate it again, the result is a new asset rather than a corrected one.
  • Limits of a register — A register of what vendors have published describes the state of the published record.
  • Comparing unlike evidence — A table can make a policy, a technical description and a line item on a price list look like three comparable positions.
  • When a cell earns a page — Most cells stay cells.
  • Counting honestly — Every count in a register rests on a rule about what qualifies, and that rule has to be published beside the number for the number to mean anything.
  • Asking the right party — Questions about a published asset have to reach whoever can answer them, which is rarely the party somebody asks first, and often not the vendor at all.

Where a record entry turns on one of these two points it links here instead of carrying a compressed version of the argument.

Elsewhere in the record: EU, Duties, Generators, Statements, Pairs, Fields, Questions, Terms, Data. How an instrument is read is set out on the sourcing page.