Japan's AI display duty for election video starts 1 March 2027

If you make AI video for a Japanese election campaign, the bill text adds a duty to show on screen that the image or video was created or altered with AI, and it applies from 1 March 2027 to elections announced on or after that date. The obligation sits on whoever distributes the campaign material online, so a production pipeline should deliver a version with the notice already burned in. This is general information from the bill text, not legal advice; check the promulgated law before you rely on it.

What the bill text says

The page below is the full text of the bill as submitted to the House of Representatives in the 221st Diet (bill 26). It is the bill as introduced. I did not read the promulgated version, so confirm that the final Article 142-5 matches before you build to it. The wording of the bill is the source for every row in the table.

The new Article 142-5 covers a person who distributes, over the internet or similar means, campaign documents or images that carry an image or video made or altered with AI technology. That technology is defined by reference to the AI Promotion Act (Act No. 53 of Reiwa 7). The distributor must make sure the notice that the image or video was created or altered with AI is displayed correctly on the screen of the recipient's device.

The same bill also adds a duty for large platforms to take measures against information that harms election fairness, with the Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications issuing guidelines. That is separate from the labelling duty on distributors, and the platform guidelines can be published before the start date.

What this means for a video pipeline

The article does not say how long the notice must stay up or how big it must be, so the safe production choice is a notice that is part of the picture. Metadata or a platform toggle can be lost when the file is re-encoded or re-uploaded; text in the frame travels with the video. If your clip is plainly stylised, for example an obvious cartoon, the exclusion for material not likely to be mistaken for real footage may apply, but that is a legal call for each clip.

Burn the notice in on Sume

Sume's video captions endpoint burns authored overlay text onto a finished clip. Send cues, each with text, start and end in seconds, and Sume skips speech-to-text and renders that text at those times. The docs list a standalone caption job at $0.20 for videos up to 60 seconds, and say to check GET /v1/catalog for the live price. The example wording below is mine, not statutory text:

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-captions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: jp-election-ai-notice-001" \
  -d '{
    "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/example/clean.mp4",
    "style": "black-outline",
    "cues": [
      { "text": "この映像はAIで作成・改変されました", "start": 0, "end": 6 }
    ]
  }'

Two practical notes. The black-outline style uses Do Hyeon, a Hangul face, as its default font, and the caption docs describe Latin and Hangul faces without documenting Japanese glyph coverage, so render a test clip and check the Japanese text in your preview before you ship; the post on burning Japanese, Chinese or Arabic captions covers what Sume documents. And for a clip that runs longer than the 6 seconds in the example, set the cue end to the clip length so the notice stays on screen throughout.

Checklist before 1 March 2027

Use this list as the pre-delivery gate for a campaign clip.

• Confirm the promulgated text of Article 142-5 and any ministry guidance on display
• Decide per clip whether it is covered, excluded as minor, or obviously not real footage
• Burn the notice into the delivered file and keep the original clean version
• Store the job ID, the cue text and the delivery date next to the file
• Re-check platform rules too: each platform can ask for its own AI label on political ads

Sume's docs do not state that generated videos carry an embedded AI marker, so do not count on file metadata to satisfy a display duty. A visible line you added yourself is the part you can verify on the delivered file.