Tagging AI-Generated People in A+ Content and Listing Images: Amazon's Rule, What Counts, and What to Do

A+ content is where lifestyle photography lives on an Amazon listing: the product in a kitchen, on a desk, in somebody's hands. For two years the generative tools in A+ Content Manager have made that imagery cheap, and a good share of the people in those pictures were never in a studio. In July 2026 Amazon told sellers that those people now have to be declared.

This is the rule as Amazon wrote it, the four cases it excludes, the mechanics of the tag, what Amazon's forum staff have clarified since, the questions that are still open, and how to run A+ and listing imagery so the disclosure is a line item rather than a risk.

Amazon's announcement to sellers is titled "You must now tag AI-generated people in listings and A+ content", and its reason is one sentence: "Recent legislation requires disclosure when images or videos in advertisements contain photorealistic AI-generated people." Amazon does not name the law; press reports connected the change to a New York statute on synthetic performers, and Amazon informed sellers on 22 July 2026 according to those reports.

The mechanism is a metadata keyword. Before uploading an image or video that contains a photorealistic AI-generated person, the seller adds the keyword contains-synthetic-performer to the dc:subject field of the file's XMP metadata, using an IPTC-compatible metadata editor. The scope is "product listing images, A+ content, and videos", and it applies in every Amazon store worldwide. When the tag is present, Amazon says it will show an indicator telling customers that the image includes AI-generated people.

The A+ Content Manager has its own version. Amazon's forum staff confirmed that the A+ upload interface carries checkboxes for marking content as "AI-generated" and for stating that it contains "AI-generated people". Sellers asked whether the checkbox alone satisfies the rule or whether the file metadata is still required; Amazon's post describes the metadata as the requirement, so the safe reading is both.

Amazon's post lists four exclusions, and they decide most real cases. The tag is not needed when the image contains only real people, even if those people were altered with AI. It is not needed for characters from films, television or games, or other expressive works. It is not needed for an image with no people in it. And it is not needed when the people are not photorealistic: an illustration, a cartoon, a stylised figure.

Amazon's staff added the practical corollary for retouching. AI used for background removal, colour correction or lighting is treated like conventional editing, provided the result is accurate and the image meets the standard image policies. So a real model, photographed in a studio and placed into a generated kitchen, is a real person and needs no tag. A generated model placed into a real kitchen does.

The rule is also prospective. Amazon's forum staff said existing published listings do not require retroactive disclosure, while recommending that older images are updated when a listing is next edited. That is the sensible route: an untagged AI model on an old A+ module is not a violation today, and it will be an untagged AI model forever unless somebody fixes it the next time the page is touched.

The announcement drew more than forty replies and most of them asked the same things. Whether a partly visible person, a hand holding the product or a figure in the background, counts. How a seller can confirm the metadata survived Amazon's image processing. Whether the A+ checkbox is sufficient on its own. Amazon's staff acknowledged the questions and said answers would follow; at the time of writing the post carries no detailed clarification, and the help pages Amazon names ("How to tag media that contains an AI-generated person", the product image guide and the shoppable video guide) sit behind the Seller Central sign in.

The conservative answer to all three is the same: if a photorealistic generated person is visible at all, tag the file and tick the box, and keep the source files so the tag can be shown to have been applied. Nothing is lost by declaring a hand.

Not as much as the replies suggest, and in one respect it is clarifying. The point of lifestyle imagery in A+ content is to answer the questions the bullets cannot: how big it is in a hand, how it looks on a shelf, who it is for. What A+ and Premium A+ are each worth sets out which modules do that work. A generated person adds nothing to those answers that a real one does not, and now adds an indicator the shopper will read.

So the practical shift is where the people come from. A product photographed on a real person, with the background generated, carries no tag. A generated person carries one. For the hero modules, the comparison chart and the use-case blocks, a day of real photography still beats a generated set, for the reason product photography that sells gives: the picture has to be true of the product the customer receives, and a generated hand holding a generated product is true of neither.

Where generated people are the only option, a long tail of products that will never justify a shoot, tag them, declare them in the A+ interface, and accept the indicator. The alternative, leaving the tag off, is a policy violation on a surface Amazon has just said it is watching, and Amazon's policy warnings explains what a listing-level violation does to an account over time.

None of this loosens the main image. The main image must be a true photograph of the product on a pure white background, filling most of the frame, with no people in most categories and no text, and a generated lifestyle scene in that slot gets the listing suppressed regardless of any tag. Amazon's 2026 image requirements cover that slot; the disclosure rule is about the secondary images, the A+ modules and the videos where people appear at all.

Keep an asset register that records, for every image and video on every listing, whether it contains a person, whether that person is real or generated, and whether the file carries the tag. Add the metadata before upload, not after, because the keyword has to be in the file Amazon receives. Tick both A+ checkboxes where they apply. When a listing is edited for any reason, review its older modules against the register and fix what needs fixing. And prefer real people in the modules that sell, because the indicator is a sentence on the page and a shopper reads it.

That register, and the modules built to it, are part of what our A+ content service produces: the comparison chart, the use-case blocks, the brand story and the lifestyle imagery, with every person in every picture accounted for. If your A+ pages were built with the generative tools before July 2026, a review of what is in them is a short job and worth doing before the next edit.