Proposal: <podcast:disclosure> for affiliates, AI, sponsorships, etc.

[theDanielJLewis]

To be in compliance with current and possibly upcoming laws, podcasters must include certain disclosures based on their content. For example:

• Anyone paid to use or talk about a product must make it obvious that they are compensated.
• Affiliates must disclose that they earn commissions.
• Certain AI usage will probably be required by law to be disclosed.
• If the guest paid to be in the podcast, that must be disclosed.

While such disclosures must be prominent and in close proximity to the information, which means always being within the content of the podcast episodes, I think they should also be disclosed within the feed.

And this would help address #663 and other concerns over AI use for generating content, maybe voices, and maybe realistic-looking images.

Examples

Here's a rough proposal for the <podcast:disclosure> tag that could be both item- and channel-level, depending on the context, allowing multiple instances for each necessary disclosure.

<podcast:disclosure type="compensation" context="links">Some of the products/services in this episode use affiliate links that compensate the podcaster for qualifying purchases.</podcast:disclosure>
<podcast:disclosure type="compensation" context="content">This episode is sponsored by its guest.</podcast:disclosure>
<podcast:disclosure type="compensation" context="ad">This episode contains paid ad placements.</podcast:disclosure>
<podcast:disclosure type="ai" context="content">This episode contains AI-generated content.</podcast:disclosure>
<podcast:disclosure type="ai" context="images">This episode uses realistic AI-generated images.</podcast:disclosure>
<podcast:disclosure type="association" context="content">I am an advisor to XYZ Acme.</podcast:disclosure>
<podcast:disclosure type="license" context="audio">"Best Song Ever" © 2024 Daniel J. Lewis. Used by permission.</podcast:disclosure>

Options

• type attribute: Defines the category of disclosure from a specific list of possibilities, such as compensation for any kind of financial or similar transaction associated with the specific content, ai for disclosure-necessary generative AI use, association for when someone might be speaking about a company with which they are associated (on the board, employed, own shares, etc.), and license for stuff that is used by special license or permission.
• context attribute (or a better name): Defines what content the disclosure is covering from a specific list of possibilities. (I thought of the attribute content, but then content="content" seems strange.) These options would include, at a minimum, links for any links mentioned in the episode or its notes, content for whole sections of content (like a paid guest appearance, a sponsored segment, a sponsored review, etc.), ad for disclosing that the episode does contain paid ads, images for use of images (cover art, chapter art, in notes, etc.), and audio (or maybe more specifically music, sound-effects, and soundbites) for any additional audio (I recognize this needs to be distinguished from something like AI-generated voices).
• Content: Open short text, ideally with the publishing tool's suggesting common (and lawyer-approved) text, or allowing the podcaster to adjust it for their needs.

Why?

This single tag can address multiple needs for legal and ethical compliance and be easily update for future needs.

What do you think?

[jamescridland]

Tags with legal implications, like this one, really need to be driven by Apple+Spotify. Without those app's support, these disclosures won't be visible for the majority of podcast listeners, and so therefore won't be a solution.

Given that YouTube does have a requirement for flagging "contains paid content", something that its current RSS ingestion feature fails to import, this might be a good start to gain take-up. Similarly, Apple has a requirement for AI to be prominently disclosed in certain circumstances. But these folk need to drive this as an idea.

[samsethi]

In TrueFans we have various paid content items - audiobooks, music, courses, films etc.

Spotify refers to "contains paid content" meaning subscription or paywall. The content we have in TrueFans can be labelled paid content but how should we do it? We can add this to the Creators Dashboard but what is the podcast tag? /cc @theDanielJLewis

[Dwev]

I think this is an excellent idea for both AI and compensation disclosures. It still requires the creator to be honest and tag correctly, but with the way pure AI-generated content is saturating a lot of platforms, I'm sure this will be needed soon.

[samsethi]

TrueFans has already added two options regarding AI. In the Creators Dashboard you can self-declare a podcast as AI hosted. We do not care if AI was used to generate the show notes or transcript just the host(s).

We then show a robot icon in the app UI to indicate AI hosted. This is similar to the Explict Tag and E icon.

We then allow users in the settings to decide if they want to hear Explicit and/or AI content.

We need to add a Podcast:AI tag to RSS like we do the explicit tag. I don't see this being a hard decision???