Article 50 of the EU AI Act applied from 2 August 2026. Every artist forum I read told sellers to start labelling their work.
I read the article. It does not say that.
The duty it creates lands mostly on the company that built the generator. Not on me, and not on you.
Who the law is actually written for
Article 50(2) is aimed at providers of systems that generate image, audio or text. They must mark their outputs in a machine-readable format.
Deployers are the rest of us, the people using the tool. Our duty is much narrower.
Article 50(4) covers deep fakes. The Act defines that as content resembling existing persons, objects, places or events. It must also "falsely appear to a person to be authentic or truthful".
There is a second deployer duty for AI text on matters of public interest. A tileable wood texture is neither of those things.
So I tested the mark itself
The machine-readable mark is the interesting part. If it works, the file tells the truth on its own.
I downloaded a 1536 by 1024 PNG straight out of an image generator. It carried a caBX chunk of 24,910 bytes. That is the C2PA manifest, and it names the tool that made the image.
Then I put that file through four ordinary steps, in the image library my own site runs on.
- Re-save as PNG. The chunk was gone.
- Resize to 4096 and save. Gone.
- Save as JPEG at quality 95. Gone.
- Save as WebP. Gone.
I ran it again with the "keep metadata" option switched on. It kept the colour profile and the EXIF block. It dropped the C2PA one.
My own files have nowhere to put a label
Then I opened one of my own 4K wood sets. Twenty-four maps, every one of them 4096 by 4096.
The PNG normal maps carry three things: the header, a pixel-density chunk, and the image data. The JPEGs carry a 16-byte JFIF header and nothing else.
No EXIF, no XMP, no C2PA. All twenty-four files, no metadata block at all.
I checked the other side too. My shop serves 2,732 images, 585 MB of them. Not one carries a metadata block either.
So the label cannot live in the file. Whatever the marking rule achieves upstream, it does not reach the buyer.
The rules that do bind a seller today
Start with ArtStation's Terms of Service. Section 19 is a list of things you warrant when you upload.
One of them is about generative AI. Sell a Digital Product made with a generative AI program, and you warrant that "you have applied the CreatedWithAI tag".
That is a contract you already signed. It binds you today, in every country, with no 2026 start date.
Superhive takes a different line. Fully AI-generated products are not allowed. Disclosure is "not strictly required in every case" but "strongly recommended".
The sentence sellers should read twice is this one. Sellers "may be requested to provide evidence of human modification" if a product looks too generated. I have written about Superhive's rules before, and this is the one I keep working files for.
BlenderKit is the shortest of the three: "we are not currently accepting AI-created assets."
One asset, three shelves, three answers
The same file is banned on one shelf, tagged on the second, and described in a sentence on the third.
None of the three asks for a machine-readable mark. All three ask for something a human types.
That is the real finding of my little test. The disclosure has to sit in the listing, because the file will not hold it.
What I do, and why I have to
I teach an AI-assisted workflow in the AI 3D modeling course. So I owe my students an answer, not a shrug.
- One sentence in every description. Which step used a generator, and what I did by hand afterwards.
- Keep the layered working file. That is what "evidence of human modification" looks like when somebody asks.
- Tag on ArtStation whenever a material portion is generated. It is a warranty, not a preference.
I already argued that an AI-generated mesh is judged on the bake, not on the wireframe screenshot. The same idea holds here. What you did by hand is the part worth describing.
When ArtStation was sold to KitBash I wrote that the AI policy would matter more than the owner's name. This is that policy, and it has not moved yet.
Where I could be wrong
This is my reading, not legal advice. The Commission's own guidance is public, so check me.
One line is genuinely open. A deep fake is content that resembles an existing object and looks authentic. A photoreal wood plank resembles an existing object.
No authority has said whether that catches a texture. No enforcement action against an asset seller exists that I can find.
Until one does, the document to read is not the AI Act. It is the terms page of the shop you sell on.
