The EU's New AI Cookie Banner

This is going to become the new cookie banner, only spectacularly less useful–everyone will ignore the labels, and anyone trying to deceive people will simply remove them.

I asked my AI for its take on this, and it thinks machine-readable provenance is the potentially useful part: it gives platforms and editors something to inspect, but only says that a co-operating tool marked a file. Its absence proves nothing, and screenshots or re-encoding can strip metadata and defeat some marks (although robust watermarking can sometimes survive transformations). I was already worried in 2023 that people and media were not ready for convincing deepfakes, and training everyone to ignore another mandatory badge will not help.