VALYDA AI PROTOCOL · EU AI Act · Creator (web, social, festival)

Since August 2, 2026, Article 50 of the EU AI Act is in force, and the transparency duty is real: publish AI-generated images, video or synthetic voice where EU rules reach, and you're meant to label it and be able to show you did. Hand-tracking "which model, what prompt, what seed, was there a source image?" for every upload is exactly the kind of thing you'll get wrong at 11pm before a launch. This node is the fix. You drop it at the end of your workflow, pick one option, hit run, and out comes a PDF plus a machine-readable record of what your workflow actually ran - no metadata copy-pasting, no spreadsheet.

It's the Creator node from the Valyda-Protocol pack, aimed at everything that goes online: social, your own site, festival submissions. One page, one decision, done. (Delivering to a broadcaster instead? Use the sibling Broadcast node - this one hides your prompt by default, which makes it incomplete for delivery contracts.)

How it works

Here's the part that makes it trustworthy: it doesn't read the pretty canvas JSON you see in the UI. It reads the executed prompt - the same API payload ComfyUI actually ran - via a hidden input, then walks every upstream node. It finds your model and hashes the real file (SHA-256, cached so it doesn't stall on a 7GB checkpoint), pulls the prompt, seed, sampler, steps, resolution, frame rate, and whether a real image entered the workflow at all. Everything the tool reads directly is logged as a measurement. Everything you type into a field is logged next to it, clearly marked as your input. If something's missing, the sheet says "not stated" - never a guess, never a placeholder.

The one honest limit, from the author's own docs: it only sees that an image entered the workflow, not where it came from. To ComfyUI, an AI image looks like a photo. So whether that reference is "real footage" or "AI-generated itself" is your call - and it's marked as your statement.

The inputs that actually matter

• Disclosure_Type - the one decision it asks of you. Realistic content → visible label required. Artistic work → discreet notice, duty remains. Clearly fantastical (dragons, people flying unaided) → no obligation. not classified → nothing gets ticked. The tool never decides this for you, and it's honest about that.
• Production + Scene - Production groups clips into one folder; spell it exactly the same on every run. Scene names the shot, e.g. Scene 14 - sky replacement.
• Store_Prompt - defaults to hide prompt, which stores only a checksum. Nobody can read your prompt, but anyone can verify you didn't change it afterwards. Choose show prompt if you might ever need a broadcast record later - plain-text prompts can't be recovered.
• Output_File - full path of the saved file. Only with this filled does the checksum bind the record to that exact file.

Connect video, images, or audio (one is enough; audio gets a waveform preview). The node outputs two strings - pdf and record - the paths to what it wrote. Both land in ComfyUI/output/valyda/<production>/, with the JSON record alongside so you can hand it to a tool later.

Installing it

ComfyUI Manager: search "Valyda-Protocol", one click. Manual:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/RebellionPictures/Valyda-Protocol
pip install -r Valyda-Protocol/requirements.txt

That's the whole dependency story: reportlab and Pillow. No models to download, no GPU, no network calls, no API key. The name sounds like a protocol with infrastructure behind it; it's actually a PDF generator. Deliberately.

Where people get burned

• Connect at least one of video/images/audio, or it errors out - there's nothing to record otherwise.
• If your ComfyUI build tries to load a video preview and throws an error, set Preview_In_Node to off. It doesn't affect the record.
• A muted VALYDA node writes nothing, and can't tell you it didn't. Check before you deliver.
• It doesn't detect AI in someone else's footage, it's not legal advice, and it's a self-declaration, not a proof of authenticity - the sheet says so on every page. That's the honest part, and it's why a broadcaster can actually trust it.