Plain language and accessibility are legal duties
Public information has to be understood by everyone who needs it, including people with low literacy, disabilities or limited command of the language. The EU Web Accessibility Directive (2016/2102) requires public sector websites and apps to meet the harmonised standard EN 301 549, which follows WCAG 2.1 at level AA, and to publish an accessibility statement; the UK has equivalent regulations. Plain language has its own standard, ISO 24495-1:2023, and in the US the Plain Writing Act of 2010 applies to federal agencies. Generation helps here more than anywhere: simpler versions, Easy Read summaries, captions and alt text can be produced alongside every piece, then checked by people who know the audience.
Impartiality and election periods
Government communication must inform, not persuade on party lines. In the UK, civil service propriety guidance and, for councils, the 2011 Code of Recommended Practice on Local Authority Publicity require publicity to be objective, even-handed and appropriate, and pre-election periods restrict new campaigns and anything that could be seen as favouring a party or candidate. Other democracies have similar conventions. AI does not change the rules, but it changes the volume: a team that can produce fifty versions of a message can also produce fifty opportunities for a partisan phrase or an image that reads as campaign material. Route everything through the same propriety checks, and pause generation of new publicity when an election period begins.
Disclosure and trust in public information
When a government image or video turns out to be synthetic and nobody said so, the damage lands on every future message. Disclose AI use in public-facing content, never generate realistic depictions of real officials, events or places as if they were documentary, and keep emergency and health information on verified material. The EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency obligations have applied since 2 August 2026, and in the UK central government departments record algorithmic tools under the Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard. Provenance helps: C2PA Content Credentials let people check where official imagery came from, and a per-asset record of which model made what answers questions from journalists and auditors.
Sovereignty, security and procurement
Public bodies buy under procurement law, such as the EU procurement directives and, in the UK, the Procurement Act 2023, in force since February 2025, and they often need data to stay in the country or region and systems to meet national security requirements. Content generation touches sensitive material: draft policy, unpublished statistics, citizens' stories. Synthetic White can be deployed in cloud, a private VPC or on-premise, with EU or US data residency, confidential work on private or self-hosted models, zero-retention agreements with model providers, and single sign-on and SCIM provisioning for staff accounts. Language duties matter too: bodies subject to rules such as the Welsh Language Standards must in most cases publish in Welsh as well as English, and generation makes that routine rather than an afterthought.
Updated 25 September 2026 · General information, not legal advice. Rules change, so check the current text with your legal team before relying on it.