AI Act Art. 50(2)
AI-content claim without machine-readable marking
What this failure is
Article 50(2) of the EU AI Act says that providers of AI systems that generate synthetic image, audio, video or text must mark the output in a machine-readable format that lets downstream systems detect it as AI-generated. A visible caption saying "AI-generated image" is helpful but does not satisfy the machine-readable requirement — that is a separate thing, embedded in the file's metadata using a standard like C2PA (Content Credentials). This scanner rule fires when it sees you claiming on the page that content is AI-generated (the phrase "AI-generated" or similar in your visible text) and reminds you that the machine-readable marking is a separate step you probably need to check.
Reference: AI Act Art. 50(2) — the authoritative spec.
Who it affects
- Downstream platforms and researchers: Social platforms, news aggregators and search engines increasingly detect C2PA credentials to flag or filter AI content; without them your work is indistinguishable from real photography.
- Users of provenance tools: Browser extensions and native OS features (Windows 11, upcoming iOS) surface C2PA data to users; unmarked AI images appear as if human-made.
- Journalists and fact-checkers: Machine-readable marking is what verification tools consume; a visible label alone does not carry through when the image is re-hosted, cropped or screenshot.
How to fix it
Concrete steps for the four platforms most small e-commerce sites run on. If you use a different stack, the underlying HTML change is the same.
Shopify
Shopify itself does not add C2PA marking. If you generate product photography with a tool that supports Content Credentials (Adobe Firefly, Photoshop's Generative Fill, Microsoft Designer, Bing Image Creator) then the marking is embedded in the file when you export it. Upload the file to Shopify as-is — do not re-save through a lossy pipeline that strips metadata. Some Shopify image optimisers strip metadata; check the app's settings for a Preserve metadata option before uploading generated images.
WooCommerce
WordPress does not strip C2PA metadata on upload, but many image-optimisation plugins do (Smush, ShortPixel, Imagify all strip EXIF and XMP by default to save bytes). Open the plugin's settings and turn on Preserve metadata or exclude your AI-generated images from optimisation. Generate images with a tool that supports C2PA (Adobe products, Leica cameras, and a growing list) and upload the original file.
Wix
Wix runs uploaded images through its own image pipeline which historically strips most metadata. There is no user-facing setting to preserve C2PA. If preserving machine-readable AI marking matters for your use case, host the image externally (a CDN that preserves metadata) and embed it via URL rather than uploading it to Wix Media Manager.
Squarespace
Squarespace's image processing strips most metadata during resize and re-encode. There is no setting to preserve C2PA credentials. If you must retain machine-readable provenance, host the original image on a service that keeps metadata (S3, Cloudflare R2, Cloudinary with metadata preservation enabled) and use a Squarespace Image block that points to that URL, or accept that in-Squarespace-hosted images will not carry credentials. This is a genuine platform limitation, not something you can work around with a setting.
Notes
This finding is advisory in the scanner — the visible claim of "AI-generated" is a positive signal, we just want you to check the invisible part too. If the content is genuinely not AI-generated and the phrase appears for another reason (a blog post reviewing AI tools, for example), you can ignore this finding. The C2PA standard is at https://c2pa.org/ and the ecosystem of supporting tools is growing quickly, so check whether your current image workflow already emits credentials before adding new steps. Article 50(2) also gives a narrow exemption where AI is used only in an assistive editing role that does not substantially alter the input — for example minor colour correction — so a human-photographed product photo lightly retouched with an AI clean-up tool is generally out of scope; a fully AI-generated hero image is not.
Check your own site
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