Part III — The Right to Know. When Transparency Becomes a Responsibility

Part III — The Right to Know

When transparency becomes a responsibility

Suppose an AI system answers a question on a company's website.

It says clearly: You are chatting with our virtual assistant.

No problem.

You know what you are dealing with.

Now imagine exactly the same technology operating through an Instagram account with a human name, a realistic face, a biography, photographs and opinions.

It comments on your posts.

You answer.

Over time, perhaps you begin to trust it.

The technology may be similar.

Your understanding of the interaction is completely different.

That difference is where transparency becomes important.

Europe has already recognised the principle

The European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) contains transparency obligations that became applicable on 2 August 2026.

Article 50 addresses several situations in which people should be informed about the involvement of AI.

Providers of certain AI systems must ensure that people are informed when they are interacting directly with an AI system, unless this is already obvious from the circumstances.

Providers of generative AI must also make certain AI-generated or manipulated output detectable in machine-readable form. Additional disclosure requirements apply to areas including deepfakes and some AI-generated text concerning matters of public interest.

The underlying principle is significant:

People should not unknowingly mistake artificial interaction or synthetic material for something human or authentic.

But social media are rapidly making the boundaries more complicated.

What exactly should be labelled?

Consider four accounts.

Account A belongs to a real woman who writes every word herself.

Account B belongs to a real woman who uses AI to help write her posts.

Account C belongs to a real person but uses a generated face, fictional biography and automated AI responses.

Account D represents no real individual identity at all and operates as a synthetic persona.

Simply attaching “AI-generated” to individual photographs does not explain those differences.

And yet those differences matter enormously to someone deciding whether to trust, employ, befriend or simply believe the account.

This suggests that content transparency and identity transparency are not the same thing.

Our regulatory frameworks are beginning to address the first.

The second deserves much more attention.

A right to know you are not talking to a human?

That raises an uncomfortable question.

Should a person have a right to know when an apparently human interaction is substantially automated?

The AI Act already embraces that principle in certain direct human-AI interactions.

But social-media identities can blur the categories.

What if a human controls the account but AI produces 90 per cent of its conversations?

What if ten people operate one persona?

What if one person operates fifty personas?

What if the photographs and biography are synthetic but every conversation is manually written by a human?

And what if an AI agent increasingly operates an identity independently?

The question “Is this a bot?” becomes surprisingly inadequate.

What matters is whether the user has been given a materially false impression about the nature of the entity with which they are interacting.

Platforms know more than their users do

Platforms occupy a unique position.

They can observe account histories, login patterns, automation signals, device behaviour, network structures and activity that ordinary users cannot see.

LinkedIn says it detects suspicious behaviour using technology and human review and can limit automated comments and inauthentic engagement. It is simultaneously expanding identity and workplace verification.

Meta uses technical standards to identify some AI-generated content.

TikTok can automatically recognise certain AI-generated material carrying Content Credentials.

The ordinary user has none of those capabilities.

That produces an important question of responsibility.

If a platform is better able than its users to identify artificial behaviour, how much of the burden should reasonably remain with the individual user?

“Be careful online” cannot be the entire answer.

But verification has a price

There is an obvious danger in demanding universal identity verification.

A social network on which every participant must disclose a government identity would solve one problem by creating several others.

Privacy matters.

Anonymity matters.

Freedom of expression matters.

People sometimes need pseudonyms.

And centralising identity information creates valuable databases that themselves require protection.

The objective should therefore not automatically be to abolish anonymity.

Perhaps the more useful distinction is between anonymity and deception.

A user might legitimately say:

I do not wish to tell you my legal name.

That is different from saying:

I am a 14-year-old girl, while deliberately constructing an entirely fictitious identity to make another person believe it.

Protecting anonymity does not necessarily require protecting deceptive impersonation.

That distinction deserves serious legal attention.

Awareness cannot carry the entire burden

For now, users can do something.

We can question unusual accounts. We can look beyond profile photographs. We can stop treating follower numbers and comments as straightforward measures of human opinion. We can be cautious when strangers seek personal contact.

But there is a limit to what individual vigilance can achieve.

A human being cannot reliably detect every AI-generated face.

A child cannot reasonably be expected to conduct digital forensics before trusting another apparent child.

And ordinary users cannot see the technical information available to the platforms hosting these interactions.

That is why this issue cannot end with digital literacy.

It becomes a question of platform design, verification, transparency and ultimately regulation.

The social contract of social media is changing

Social media were built around a simple idea:

people connecting with people.

Artificial Intelligence does not make that idea obsolete.

It does make it less safe to assume.

There is nothing inherently wrong with using AI to create, write, translate or communicate. AI can expand human creativity and make knowledge accessible in extraordinary ways.

The line becomes different when technology is deliberately used to manufacture human identity, human support or human consensus while the recipient is encouraged to believe it is genuine.

Perhaps that is the principle around which the next stage of regulation should develop:

Not compulsory exposure of everyone's identity.

Not suspicion of everything artificial.

But meaningful transparency when technology is being used to imitate the presence, identity or independent judgement of another human being.

Because in a digital society, knowing what we are looking at is becoming inseparable from knowing who — or what — is looking back.

Awareness matters.

But awareness cannot carry the entire burden.

JAS — Aware Solutions

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The legal backbone of Part III is Article 50 of the EU AI Act, applicable since 2 August 2026. The European Commission says it addresses risks including impersonation and manipulation and requires transparency in specified direct AI interactions as well as machine-readable marking of AI-generated or manipulated material. � Meta has meanwhile joined the EU code concerning transparency of AI-generated content. � LinkedIn's 2026 measures are particularly relevant to the identity question because it is simultaneously fighting automation and expanding profile and workplace verification. �