AI-Generated Material Labels on Chinese Social Media Platforms

Key Highlights

• Compliance: Major social media platforms in China are now labeling AI-generated content to adhere to new regulations.
• User Responsibility: WeChat users must label their own AI content and cannot modify or remove these labels.
• Detection: Douyin can identify AI-generated content through metadata, while Weibo allows reporting of unlabelled AI material.
• Legislation: The new law aims to regulate the increasing amount of generative AI content online.

Major social media platforms in China have started rolling out labels for AI-generated content to comply with a law that took effect on Monday. Users of the likes of WeChat, Douyin, Weibo and RedNote (aka Xiaohongshu) are now seeing such labels on posts. These denote the use of generative AI in text, images, audio, video and other types of material, according to the . Identifiers such as watermarks have to be included in metadata too.

WeChat has told users they must proactively apply labels to their AI-generated content. They’re also prohibited from removing, tampering with or hiding any AI labels that WeChat applies itself, or to use “AI to produce or spread false information, infringing content or any illegal activities.”

ByteDance’s Douyin — the Chinese version of TikTok — similarly urged users to apply a label to every post of theirs that includes AI-generated material while noting it’s able to use metadata to detect where a piece of content came from. Weibo, meanwhile, has added the option for users to report “unlabelled AI content” when they see something that should have such a label.

Four agencies drafted the law — which was — including the main internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security and the National Radio and Television Administration also helped put together the legislation, which is being enforced to help oversee the tidal wave of genAI content. In April, the CAC launched a three-month campaign to regulate AI apps and services.

Mandatory labels for AI content could help folks better understand when they’re seeing AI slop and/or misinformation instead of something authentic. Some US companies that provide genAI tools offer similar labels and are starting to bake such identifiers into hardware. Google’s content credentials are the first phones that implement Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity content credentials.