Transparency Obligations
EU AI Act duties to disclose AI use to affected people — for example, when interacting with a chatbot or seeing AI-generated content.
What is Transparency Obligations?
Transparency obligations apply broadly, not only to high-risk systems. Deployers of emotion-recognition or biometric-categorisation systems have additional disclosure duties; providers of generative AI must mark synthetic outputs. See AI Governance & Compliance Problems.
What is an example of Transparency Obligations?
A customer-service chatbot clearly tells users they are interacting with AI at the start of the conversation and provides an accessible route to a human, while synthetic media is marked in a machine-readable format where required.
How is Transparency Obligations different from related concepts?
Transparency tells people that AI is used and provides relevant information. Explainability helps a particular audience understand a system or outcome. Disclosure alone does not make a decision explainable.
What should enterprises evaluate for Transparency Obligations?
- Map each use case to the exact duty, responsible actor, audience, trigger, exception, and application date.
- Make notices timely, prominent, accessible, understandable, and consistent across channels and languages.
- Retain evidence that the disclosure was presented and test whether users actually recognize its meaning.
Authoritative sources
Primary sources for the formal meaning, requirements, or original research behind Transparency Obligations:
Putting Transparency Obligations to work?
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