What the marking duty says about audio
The marking duty lists audio first and discussion of it runs almost entirely on pictures. Two entries in this record address audio, and both had to choose between a record beside the file and a signal hidden inside it. As of 2026-09-12.
| Point | Where it sits | What the record holds |
|---|---|---|
| The duty covers audio | Article 50(2), provider | Synthetic audio is named alongside image, video and text |
| No visible layer exists | Both audio entries | A waveform has no corner to put a notice in |
| Coverage inside one product | One audio entry | Models from elsewhere are generally not marked |
Inclusion rule. Entries whose recorded marking mechanism concerns sound. Entries describing video or images are covered on their own pages. Order. The duty first, then what the entries say about it.
1Audio removes one of the three options
For pictures a vendor can attach a manifest, embed a signal, or render a notice. For sound the third is not available in any comparable way, so the practical choice is a container record or something mixed into the audio.
Both audio entries here chose the second. That makes them the two entries whose marks survive a container rebuild, and the two whose marks carry least information.
2Speech travels through the most hostile pipelines
A generated line is mixed under music, ducked, limited, compressed for a platform and sometimes played into a room and captured again. Each step is a chance for an embedded signal to be attenuated past detection.
None of those steps appears in either entry's durability claim. One measures a quality trade-off; the other names no operations at all. The record marks the gap rather than guessing across it.
3The deployer duty is where audio gets awkward
A viewer can be shown a notice. A listener has to be told, which means a disclosure in the surrounding publication rather than in the file, and nothing in either entry helps with that.
Both entries record that nothing audible or visible is described. So for audio the publisher's half of the article is entirely the publisher's, with no tool-side assistance documented anywhere in this record.
- ElevenLabs (elevenlabs.io)Watermarking embeds imperceptible patterns into audio at frequencies masked by existing sounda speech and audio generator
- Meta AudioSeal (ai.meta.com)A generator and detector architecture trained jointly with a localization loss, for detection down to the sample levela speech watermarking scheme
- Article 50(2)Providers must mark synthetic audio, image, video and text in a machine-readable formatincluding general-purpose AI systems
- ElevenLabsModels from other providers offered through the platform are generally not watermarked unless stated otherwisecoverage inside the vendor's own product
4Sources
Article wording from AI Act Explorer, Article 50; vendor statements from the pages listed on each generator entry. Both read 2026-09-12. Related: Open weights, What an omission proves, Two layers at once.