The EU just made authenticity official (and I think that's worth talking about)

A quiet and, at least to me, significant policy shift happened this week in Brussels. The European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU announced that fully AI-generated images and videos are now banned from official communications. Not limited. Not flagged. Banned.

It is still allowed to use gen-AI to do useful things, like sharpening a blurry photo and cleaning up audio on a video clip. But when it comes to creating visuals from scratch, that door is closed for official EU messaging.

The reason they gave is one I find genuinely compelling: authenticity. They want citizens to trust that what the EU shows them is real.

Authenticity is now an explicit institutional value. Not a design principle. An institutional one.

If you work in EU research communications like I do (producing dissemination materials, writing reports, building infographics and data visualisations to bring research to life), this matters more than it might first appear.
EU-funded projects are held to a standard that reflects the values of the institution funding them. And now one of those values has a very specific shape: your visuals need to be grounded in authenticity. This means, for example, a real photograph or illustration, not a generated one.

It’s important for the people who commission dissemination materials. If your project deliverables include materials intended to represent EU institutions, you'll want to make sure your visuals can stand up to authenticity standard.

So if you're working on Horizon Europe project dissemination, building out your project's communication strategy, or simply trying to figure out how to make your research findings legible to a broader audience, let me know, because I'd love to help-with visuals that are thoughtfully designed and fully authentic.