On 20 July the European Commission issued guidelines on how to meet the transparency obligations under Article 50 of the AI Act. From 2 August they take effect: a system that talks to a person must say it's a machine, and generated text, image and video must carry a machine-readable mark that they were made by AI. For anyone putting AI in front of a customer in the EU - so in Bulgaria too - this is now a task with a deadline.
- The European Commission published the Article 50 AI Act guidelines (transparency) on 20 July 2026.
- The obligations apply from 2 August: a chatbot says it's a chatbot; AI-generated content carries a machine-readable mark.
- Deployers must disclose deepfakes, AI-generated text on matters of public interest without human editing, and emotion recognition/biometric categorization. It applies to Bulgaria too.
From 2 August, customer-facing AI stops being a matter of taste and budget. It becomes a matter of rule - with a date, and with something you have to show.
In practice it splits in two. If you build the system - it's your job to put the mark inside, and to have the chatbot say for itself that it's a chatbot. If you just use it in front of customers - then you disclose: that the other side is a machine, that the video is a deepfake, that the text was written by a model with no human review. The small business here that puts a 'virtual assistant' on the site or runs a generated ad falls right into the second bucket.
The guidelines themselves aren't a new law. They explain how to read the article, so it isn't interpreted a different way by everyone. What's firm is the other part: the date. By 2 August it's wise to go through every place where AI touches the customer - chat, content, ads - and put the label on, before someone asks you for it.
This isn't a brake. It's a direction we hold to anyway: say what's machine. A customer who finds out on their own that the 'person' in the chat was a bot walks away. A customer you told upfront stays. The rule just writes into law something good practice already does - not hiding who's talking.