The EU's Three AI Disclosure Icons
The EU's marking Code of Practice finalised three official disclosure icons. Where they belong on a video, and why they stack with platform labels.
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TikTok's allow high-quality uploads setting
TikTok compresses harder on mobile data and hides a high-quality upload toggle. Find it by name, upload on wifi, and stop re-encoding a clean render.
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Caption length shrinks TikTok's safe zone
TikTok's own ad docs say the usable frame contracts as caption text grows, which makes caption copy a layout input you decide before the export, not after.
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Trade school video: substantiating placement claims
Every placement rate and salary figure in a trade school video needs evidence on demand. A claims-to-source table and an instructor-plus-lab format that scales.
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Transient or permanent: classifying failures
A failed generation is terminal for that ID. Use the transient flag to decide if a new job is worth the credits, and stop retrying work that cannot succeed.
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TTS reads numbers, dates and acronyms wrong
Normalization mangles currency, ranges, dates and initialisms before synthesis. A preprocessing pass that writes the script the way it should be spoken.
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Turning vague client notes into changes
A translation table from client language to testable production changes, plus the three questions that resolve a vague note before you spend attempts.
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Building a UGC rate card that prices usage rights
Usage rights, not production, are where UGC margin lives. A rate card separating base fee from 30-day, 90-day and unlimited buyout, plus enforcing clauses.
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The upscale broke text that was already correct
Generative upscalers re-draw letterforms and will respell a word that was already right. Mask text out of the pass, or drop denoise on text-bearing images.
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Variable frame rate breaks caption timing
Phone footage and screen recordings often carry variable frame rate. Detect VFR, transcode to a constant rate, then caption so cues stop drifting.
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9:16 keeps cutting your subject off at the waist
Aspect ratio is a composition input, not a crop. Tall frames need shot-type language that reaches the feet, plus recovery options short of a re-roll.
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The outfit changes between shot 2 and shot 3
Costume drift is identity drift you only catch at assembly. Reuse one wardrobe block verbatim, and know which garment details need a still instead of text.
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What an AI-use audit clause covers
Vague audit rights over AI use turn into open-ended discovery. A scoped clause, plus the record set that makes the whole audit take an hour.
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What goes in a $1,500 local video retainer
A defensible entry tier: deliverable count, format mix, revision cap, reporting cadence, four written exclusions, and the triggers for the next tier.
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What belongs in a prompt pack people don't refund
A list of prompts is not a product. The contents template that separates a pack buyers keep from one they refund within the hour.
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What Test & Compare won't let you test
Shorts, Made for Kids, private, and age-restricted videos cannot run Test & Compare. The eligibility matrix, what stops a live test, and workarounds.
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What the ELVIS Act protects in a voice
Tennessee made voice a protected personal right and reached the tool layer, not only publishers. Why building with voice clones carries statutory exposure.
7 min read
What to write instead of a negative prompt
Negative prompts are a no-op on flow-matching models and leak the negated noun elsewhere. Positive re-specification and the three constraints that replaced it.
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What 'you own the output' actually means
Vendor terms can assign you an output file. They cannot make it copyrightable. How to separate contractual ownership from protectability before you ship.
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When a 4K export is worth the credits
Most social delivery wastes the 4K premium. The three cases that earn it, the reframe arithmetic behind them, and a per-destination resolution rule.
8 min read
When the agent picks the wrong sub-agent
Misrouting is usually ambiguous phrasing, not a broken agent. Word the first sentence so only one of the six domains can claim the job.
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Who indemnifies what in an AI contract
Indemnity splits two ways: you cover tool terms-of-service breaches, the client covers distribution and labelling. A two-way split to drop into an agreement.
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Who owns the prompt library you built?
Prompts, reference sets and workflow graphs built on a client job are unassigned in most contracts. Clause language that keeps method and gives outputs.
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A batch of eight is not eight single runs
Batch size changes the noise each sample gets. A batched call and eight parallel calls diverge, even with the same seeds. Know when that variance is harmless.
9 min read