Re: Proposal: Element-level AI content disclosure in HTML

Fabien,

Incentives for publishers beyond compliance with regulation is a very
interesting subject. I think incentives for consumers (both humans reading
the material as well as scraping / training / inferring agents) are more
obvious - people want the provenance of what they're reading.

FYI, we have now stood up a W3C Community Group on AI Content Disclosure:
https://www.w3.org/community/ai-content-disclosure/ - I'd encourage those
interested to join!

-David


On Wed, Jan 28, 2026 at 5:02 AM Fabien Gandon <fabien.gandon@inria.fr>
wrote:

> Hello David,
>
> Thanks for sharing these pointers on the list.
> I found the discussion on issue 261
> <https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/261> interesting.
> I wondered if discussions also started on the potential incentives (beyond
> EU regulation) for content providers, publishers, etc. to adopt and include
> such disclosure attribute and its granularity?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Fabien Gandon, Wimmics <https://team.inria.fr/wimmics/> (Inria,
> Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, I3S, France)
> @fabien_gandon <https://twitter.com/fabien_gandon> - http://fabien.info
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> *De: *"David E. Weekly" <dweekly@gmail.com>
> *À: *"WebAI Interest Group at W3C" <public-webai@w3.org>
> *Envoyé: *Lundi 26 Janvier 2026 23:13:43
> *Objet: *Proposal: Element-level AI content disclosure in HTML
>
> Hi all,
>
> I've been working on a proposal for standardizing how web authors disclose
> AI involvement in HTML content — not at the page level (which
> whatwg/html#9479 covers) or the HTTP level (which the IETF AI-Disclosure
> header covers), but at the element level, so a page with a human-written
> article and an AI-generated sidebar can label each section appropriately.
>
> The proposal adds an `ai-disclosure` attribute to any HTML element with
> four values: `none`, `ai-assisted`, `ai-generated`, and `autonomous`,
> aligned with the IETF header and IPTC Digital Source Type vocabulary. It's
> designed to complement C2PA rather than compete with it — voluntary
> declaration vs. cryptographic verification.
>
> Some context on where things stand:
> - Explainer: https://github.com/dweekly/ai-content-disclosure
> - WICG proposal: https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/261
> - ChromeStatus: https://chromestatus.com/feature/5078123181899776
> - Mozilla standards position:
> https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1344
> - WebKit standards position:
> https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/605
>
> One of the motivations is the EU AI Act Article 50 requirement for
> machine-readable marking of AI-generated text (effective August 2026).
> Happy to present at a meeting if that would be useful.
>
>
> - David
>
>
>