Platform AI policies
Platform policy moves faster than legislation and applies whether or not the AI Act does. The common ground is narrower than it looks: everyone requires accuracy, and they differ on disclosure.
What they all require
- The product shown is the product sold. This predates AI and is enforced hardest.
- No misleading representation of what the product does or looks like.
- No synthetic depiction of real people without rights.
- Compliance with local law, which now includes the AI Act in the EU.
Where they differ
| Platform | Position on generated content |
|---|---|
| Google Shopping | No specific ban; product accuracy rules apply in full |
| Google Ads | Disclosure required for synthetic content in election ads |
| Meta | Advertiser disclosure controls; automatic labelling from detected signals |
| TikTok | Explicit labelling required for realistic synthetic content |
| Labels content detected as generated |
Note what that table does not say: none of these platforms prohibit generated product imagery. The rules are about accuracy and about labelling content that could be mistaken for a photograph of a real scene.
Several platforms read provenance signals automatically and label on that basis. That is another reason to keep marking intact rather than to strip it: an unlabelled image that is detected anyway looks like concealment.
The Merchant Center specifics
Google’s product image rules are the operative constraint for Shopping, and they are about the image rather than its provenance: the product on its own, no overlays, no watermarks, no text, no placeholders, and consistency with the landing page. A generated image that meets those is acceptable; a photograph that does not, is not.
A single policy that satisfies all of them
- Main images are corrective work on a real photograph of the item.
- Generated scenes go in additional images, social ads and the product page.
- Any generated person or place is labelled using the platform’s own control.
- Provenance marking is preserved everywhere it survives.
- One record of what was generated, kept centrally.
That policy is stricter than any single platform requires today, which means it does not need rewriting the next time one of them updates.