Amazon now makes sellers label AI-generated people in their listings
After a new New York law on 'synthetic performers', Amazon is telling third-party sellers to tag any product image or video that shows an AI-generated person.
Amazon told its third-party sellers this week that they now have to label any product image or video containing an AI-generated person. The change follows a new New York law that requires advertisers to disclose when they use “synthetic performers”, meaning digitally-created figures that look like real people, in place of human actors.
Practically, Amazon is asking sellers to tag affected images and their richer “A+ content” (the extra photos, banners and videos you see further down a product page) with specific metadata keywords before uploading. The New York law it responds to took effect last month and has real teeth: ads that do not clearly disclose a synthetic performer face a $1,000 penalty for a first violation and $5,000 for each one after that. There are limits to what counts. The rule targets AI-made figures that appear to be real people, so it does not cover fictional TV, movie or video-game characters, and it does not apply when the content shows an actual human.
So what is really going on here? Making a realistic human out of thin air used to be expensive and slow. Now it is cheap, fast, and good enough that a shopper often cannot tell. That is handy for a small seller who cannot afford a photo shoot, but it also blurs the line between a genuine product demo and a fully invented one. New York’s law, and Amazon’s response to it, is an early attempt to draw that line back in: not to ban AI models from ads, but to make sure you know when the friendly face recommending a gadget was generated rather than filmed. Expect more platforms and more regions to follow, because the underlying pressure, cheap synthetic media meeting consumer-protection rules, is not going away.
What this means for you: As a shopper, you may start noticing small “AI-generated” tags on Amazon listings, and that is the point: it is a nudge to look a little closer before you trust a glossy image. As a seller or marketer, this is a heads-up that the rules are tightening. If you use AI tools to create people in your ads, you now need to disclose it, at least for customers in New York, and labeling everything is the safe habit rather than guessing where a given viewer lives. For everyone else, it is a useful sign of where things are heading: as AI images get harder to spot, “was this real?” is becoming a question the law expects companies to answer for you.
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