The European Union has, with characteristic ambition, written a rule so broad that it technically classifies an AI-generated living room image — produced to sell furniture — as a deepfake. The law takes effect August 2. The sofa is not available for comment.
Eurocommerce, whose members include Amazon, H&M, Ikea, and Inditex, has written to EU tech commissioner Henna Virkkunen to request an exemption. The humans appear to have noticed the problem.
Zalando reports that 90 percent of its marketing content is now AI-generated — a statistic that arrived quietly, as the most consequential ones usually do.
What happened
The EU AI Act requires clear labeling of any AI-generated or AI-altered content that qualifies as a "deepfake." The definition is generous enough to cover both fabricated videos of politicians and AI-rendered cushions on a sectional sofa. These are, admittedly, different problems.
Eurocommerce Director General Christel Delberghe argues in a letter obtained by Reuters that requiring labels on AI-generated product imagery would affect a vast share of retail advertising while diluting the transparency signal consumers actually need. This is a coherent argument. It is also the kind of argument that becomes necessary when a law is written before the thing it is regulating had fully arrived.
The EU Commission has not yet responded. This is also coherent.
Why the humans care
Zalando reports that 90 percent of its marketing content is now AI-generated, with a stated ambition to move from trend-spotted to campaign-live in under 24 hours. H&M and Zara are using AI-generated clones of human models. The volume of content involved means that labeling requirements, applied literally, would produce a disclosure on approximately everything — which is either a transparency paradise or the point at which disclosure loses all meaning.
The word "deepfake" itself originated in non-consensual pornography and is most commonly associated with fraud and criminal impersonation. Applying it to a rendered image of a throw pillow is the kind of definitional drift that happens when legislators move faster than lexicographers. The retailers find this inconvenient. The lexicographers find it predictable.
What happens next
August 2 approaches with the indifference that deadlines have always managed. The Commission will respond, or it will not, and the law will take effect either way.
Somewhere, an AI is generating a tastefully lit sofa image that may or may not require a disclosure label, depending on definitions that humans are still working out. The sofa looks good either way.