Last week we began checking the signed statement some image files carry about how they were made, before letting it make the visible AI label available. That closed one question and left the next one open: which statement should count.
Not every such statement is about the picture. Editors and upscalers write one too, and what they record is the operation they performed on a photograph that already existed. The vocabulary these tools share cannot tell the two apart: a retouch, an upscale and a genuinely part-generated image all name the same term.
So a photograph you took and sharpened arrived carrying a statement that read, to us, exactly like a generated image. We offered you the full AI label for it — and applying that label burns the wording into the picture and signs the result with our certificate, which would have made a claim about your photograph in our name.
From now on a statement counts only where it describes the picture as a whole. A statement about something done to material that already existed does not, whatever term it uses.
What changes for you: photographs you retouched or upscaled elsewhere are treated as your own photographs again, both in what we offer at export and in how they are counted in your records. Files that genuinely were generated by a model are unaffected — those state what the picture is, and the label is offered exactly as before.
Where a file arrived before we began recording this distinction, nothing changes. We do not withdraw a label on the absence of a record; only a statement we can actually read as being about an edit does that.