AI Usage Scale
ES

For publishers · applies from 2 August 2026

The law can see the difference. It just cannot say it.

Article 50 of the EU AI Act switches the disclosure duty for AI-generated text off the moment a human reviews it and takes editorial responsibility. That switch is the distinction between Level 5 and Level 4 — the law reaches for it, and has no word for it.

This page is orientation, not legal advice, and the scale is not a compliance product. The text of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 is authoritative, in every EU language; our roadmap includes legal review of this explanation.

What Article 50 requires

The transparency obligations in Article 50 apply from 2 August 2026. The parts that concern people who publish:

Art. 50(4) — AI-generated text
Deployers who publish AI-generated or AI-manipulated text "with the purpose of informing the public on matters of public interest" must disclose that it was artificially generated. The obligation does not apply where the content "has undergone a process of human review or editorial control and where a natural or legal person holds editorial responsibility for the publication".
Art. 50(4) — deepfakes
Deployers of image, audio or video deepfakes must disclose the artificial generation or manipulation; for evidently artistic, creative, satirical or fictional work the duty is limited to a disclosure that does not hamper the enjoyment of the work.
Art. 50(2) — machine-readable marking
Providers of generative AI systems — the people who build the model or system, not the people who publish with it — must ensure outputs are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated, so far as technically feasible.
Art. 50(5) — how
The information must be provided in a clear and distinguishable manner, at the latest at the first interaction or exposure.

Where the scale lands on it

The law's test for text is binary — reviewed with editorial responsibility, or not. Those are the two states this scale names as Level 4 and Level 5:

You publish atUnder Art. 50(4)
Level 5 · Automated No human review — the disclosure duty applies to text informing the public on matters of public interest. A visible Level 5 declaration is a disclosure, made in a vocabulary a reader can look up.
Level 4 · Prompted Human review and editorial responsibility — the very precondition of the law's exemption. Disclosure stops being an obligation and becomes what it should have been all along: a credit line you give the reader anyway.
Levels 0–3 Reviewed by definition wherever a model produced text (Levels 2–3), or no generative output at all (Levels 0–1). The same logic as Level 4: exempt where the duty could apply — and worth declaring regardless.

Whether a given page "informs the public on matters of public interest", and who counts as the deployer, are questions for a lawyer, not a badge. The scale does not decide them; it gives you the words for whichever side of the line you are on.

What to put on an automated page

For a Level 5 pipeline, the declaration is one sentence and two lines of metadata — visible at first exposure, machine-readable, linked to a public definition:

The sentence, where the reader sees it

Generated by AI and published without human review. Level 5 on the AI Usage Scale.

The metadata, in the <head>

<meta name="ai-usage" content="5">
<meta name="ai-usage-standard" content="https://usagescale.org">
<link rel="ai-disclosure" href="https://usagescale.org/5">

The full kit — marks, all three sentence lengths, per-level metadata — is on each level's page. Note that ai-usage metadata is this standard's proposal and the ai-disclosure value is experimental; neither is, by itself, a guarantee of compliance with Article 50's marking or disclosure duties.

Sources