AI background behind real product footage: TikTok's reported rule

Plan to label it. Audit Socials, a third-party summary and not TikTok's page, reports that TikTok requires a label for photorealistic AI backgrounds and AI-generated product images, among other cases (read 2026-10-02). A real product clip over a generated living room still has a photorealistic AI scene behind it, so the summary's wording points to a label. Confirm in TikTok's own control.

Which parts of the shot are AI?

Split the clip into layers before deciding. People often think of the product as the clip and the background as decoration, but the rule as reported looks at what viewers see.

How do you build and record it with Sume?

Timeline compose puts one Sume-hosted still and one Sume-hosted video on screen at once and returns one MP4 for $0.02 per job (confirm in GET /v1/catalog). Put the generated background still behind or above your footage with stack or overlay, and save the compose job id alongside the image job id that made the background.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/timeline-1.0/compose \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: compose-bg-001" \
  -d '{"operation": "stack",
       "image": {"url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/background.png"},
       "video": {"url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/product.mp4"}}'

What if the background is obviously not real?

The rule as reported concerns photorealistic content. A flat illustrated backdrop is a different question, and the summary does not draw the line. When in doubt, label: it is one tap, and the post-flag route is a distribution hold and a penalty count that the same summary describes.