Controversial Proposal To Label Sections Of AI Generated Content via @sejournal, @martinibuster

A new proposal was published for creating an HTML attribute that can be helpful for notifying crawlers what part of a web page is generated by AI. The proposal is quickly becoming relevant because of new rules coming into effect in Europe this summer, but some are questioning whether this is the right solution to that problem.

AI Disclosure

The proposal was created by David E. Weekly (LinkedIn profile), who noted that there are currently proposals that provide a more general signal that an entire web page is AI generated but nothing that labels only a section of a web page in a page that is otherwise authored by a human.

Weekly’s proposal acknowledges the reality that many web pages are partially AI generated. One example is the AI generated summaries of news content. The proposal specifically mentions news sites that contain a sidebar with AI generated summaries.

The proposal suggests creating an HTML attribute that can be applied at the section level using the

Weekly explains how it solves a problem:

“A news article page might contain a human-written investigation alongside an AI-generated summary sidebar. Existing approaches only support page-level disclosure (the tag proposed in whatwg/html#9479) or HTTP response-level signals (IETF draft-abaris-aicdh-00). Neither allows marking individual sections of a page, which is what 42+ commenters on the WHATWG issue identified as the key missing capability.

The EU AI Act Article 50 (effective August 2026) requires machine-readable marking of AI-generated text content, creating regulatory demand for exactly this kind of standard.”

The Aside Element

The

The definition of the

is:

“The

So the use of the

So, is this an imperfect solution in the context of an AI generated summary that is directly related to the document’s main content? I think it may be. Nobody in the GitHub discussion brings up this obvious disconnect in the use of the

The core rule of the

Not A Settled Proposal

There is a lively conversation going on in the GitHub repository for the proposal. One of the purposes of the

They wrote:

“I’ve reviewed the proposal and the surrounding discussion, including the arguments in favor and against. However, the more I read, the more uncertainty I have about the practical necessity of introducing additional markup at the platform level. At the moment, this approach seems primarily aimed at satisfying formal or regulatory requirements, without a clearly demonstrated benefit for the web ecosystem as a whole.”

The takeaway is that the commenter sees the proposal as compliance-driven markup that platforms would be expected to add even when it does not clearly improve the web itself, and that concern becomes sharper if the implementation pushes disclosure into existing semantic HTML elements like