Some image files carry a statement about how they were made, written inside the file by whatever produced it. Several image generators do this as a matter of course, so a picture you were sent, or downloaded from another tool, may already say "made by a trained model" without anyone mentioning it.
Until now we did not look. Anything you uploaded was treated as your own photograph, on the reasoning that we had not generated it ourselves — which is true, and is not the same question.
Two things follow from that, and both were wrong in your disfavour.
The visible AI label was refused for those files. When you downloaded such a photo and asked for the badge, we declined, on the grounds that stamping an AI claim onto somebody's own product photograph would be untrue. Sound reasoning about the wrong file: the file itself said it was AI. If you are obliged to mark that image on your listing, we were the thing standing in the way. The label is now offered.
And the file was described as your photograph. In the records that say what each image is, a file declaring a trained-model origin was filed as your own picture. That is now decided by what the file says as well.
Nothing here is a judgement about your image. We record what the file states, as the file's own statement, and we make no claim of our own about how a picture was made. We do not analyse your pixels, we do not guess from the filename or where the upload came from, and we still do not decide whether your listing needs a visible label — that stays yours, and the label quiz is there to help you work it out.
Some limits worth knowing:
- A photograph is still a photograph. A file that says nothing, and a file whose statement is "a camera took this", are both treated exactly as before. Only a statement of a trained-model origin changes the answer, and it can only ever move a file out of the photograph category, never into it.
- This applies from now on. Files you uploaded before this change were never read and are left as they are; nothing was reclassified retroactively.
- The statement does not survive into what you download. We re-encode uploads on the way in, which drops the original file's statement. We record it before that happens; carrying it through is a separate piece of work.
This supersedes one line in the visible AI label entry, which said photos you uploaded yourself are never labelled. That is now true only of files that do not say otherwise.