Amazon makes sellers tag AI-generated people in images

If you've been generating product photos with an AI model standing in for a real one, Amazon just made that a metadata problem. The company told third-party sellers this week that any product image or A+ content containing a photorealistic AI-generated person has to carry a specific tag before it's uploaded. This isn't a suggestion buried in a style guide — it's a listing requirement, and it lands on the sellers who move more than 60% of Amazon's units.

What actually happened

CNBC reported that Amazon notified sellers Wednesday of a policy change requiring disclosure of AI-generated people in product images and in A+ content — the enhanced graphics and video on listing pages. The mechanism is embedded metadata: sellers add the keyword contains-synthetic-performer to qualifying assets using an IPTC-compatible editor before upload. Amazon then uses that signal to surface a disclosure on the listing "where applicable."

The scope has edges. It covers photorealistic synthetic humans — the kind indistinguishable from a real person. It excludes TV, movie, and video game characters, and it doesn't cover real people whose appearance was touched up with AI tools.

The driver is New York General Business Law § 396-b, which took effect June 9 and requires advertisers who knowingly use a "synthetic performer" to disclose it. We wrote about that law when it landed — fines start at $1,000. What's new is the enforcement path: one state statute has become a platform-wide obligation for every seller, in every state, on the largest marketplace in the country.

Why it matters for your business

This is how compliance actually reaches small operators. Not via a regulator knocking, but via a marketplace changing its upload rules on a Wednesday. If you sell on Amazon and your creative pipeline includes a generated model holding your product, you now have a tagging step — and if you outsource photography or hire a freelancer to produce AI creative, that obligation flows to you, not them.

The practical trap is metadata stripping. Most image workflows — resizing scripts, CDN optimizers, Canva exports, a designer saving "for web" — quietly discard IPTC fields. You can tag an asset correctly and still ship an untagged file. Verify the tag survives your last export step, not your first.

And treat this as the template rather than the exception. Amazon moved first because New York moved first. Walmart, Etsy, Shopify's channels, and the ad platforms are looking at the same statute. The cheap version of this is a provenance field in your product data — one column that says whether an asset contains a synthetic person — so the next platform's rule is a query, not a re-audit of 400 SKUs.

Sources: CNBC, eWeek.