Amazon now requires a metadata tag on any listing image with an AI-generated person

Amazon has told sellers that any product image, lifestyle image, video or A+ Content asset containing a photorealistic person generated entirely by AI must be tagged before it is uploaded. The tag is a keyword, contains-synthetic-performer, written into the dc:subject XMP field of the file with an IPTC-compatible metadata editor, according to eWeek's report on the policy. Amazon then shows a disclosure to shoppers on listings where the tag is present.

The rule took effect on July 22 and applies across Amazon's worldwide stores, GeekSeller reports. In its notice to sellers, Amazon said that recent legislation requires disclosure when images or videos in advertisements contain photorealistic AI-generated people.

The New York law behind it

That legislation is New York's amendment to General Business Law section 396-b, signed in December 2025 and in force since June 9, 2026. Governor Kathy Hochul's office called it the first law in the nation to require a disclosure when an advertisement includes a synthetic performer, defined as digitally created media that gives the impression of a human performance by someone who is not an identifiable real person. The governor framed it as setting the rules of the road rather than letting AI run the show.

The statute reaches anyone who makes, publishes or places an advertisement containing a synthetic performer, and carries civil penalties of $1,000 for a first violation and $5,000 for each one after, according to Cooley's analysis of the law. A product listing on Amazon is an advertisement visible in New York, which is why the marketplace moved the disclosure burden onto the seller who owns the asset and made it a condition of upload rather than a policy sellers could read and ignore.

What has to be tagged, and what does not

The scope is narrower than the headline suggests. Only people who were generated entirely by AI and are photorealistic need the tag. A real model in a photo that was later retouched, relit or extended with AI tools still counts as a real person and needs no tag, GeekSeller notes. Images with no people, AI-generated room or background scenes without a person in them, non-photorealistic or illustrated figures, and characters from film, television and games are all exempt. For A+ Content, sellers can tick an AI-generated people checkbox in the Creative Assets manager instead of editing metadata by hand, per Ecomclips' step-by-step guide.

The operational trap is that XMP metadata is fragile. My Amazon Guy warns that file exports and digital asset management systems routinely strip embedded fields, so a tag added in one tool can be gone by the time the file reaches Seller Central. Ecomclips reports the consequences: non-compliant media may be removed, and repeated problems can lead to enforcement action against the seller account. It is the second listing-surface rule Amazon has enforced this summer, following the 75-character title cap, and both push sellers toward a more controlled, auditable content pipeline.

Where this lands for furniture imagery

Why it matters: Furniture is one of the categories where AI imagery has spread fastest, because a rendered sofa in a rendered living room is cheaper than a photo shoot and often looks better. Most of that output contains no person and is untouched by this rule. The exposure is in lifestyle scenes that add a figure for scale or mood, the person reading in the armchair or working at the desk, and those are exactly the images that sell big-ticket pieces. Every one of them now needs the tag if the figure is synthetic, and a seller who cannot say which assets in a thousand-SKU catalog contain an AI person has a compliance gap they cannot close by policy alone. The workable answer is a rule at the point of creation: decide per image whether a synthetic person is present, write the tag then, and verify it survives export before upload.

What it means for our partners: Our image production keeps a record of which lifestyle assets contain AI-generated people and writes the contains-synthetic-performer tag at render time, so supplier catalogs stay compliant without a retroactive audit.