A credit is a sentence about who did the work. If a stranger can read it and tell what a person did, and what a tool did, it is doing its job. If it hides the tool, or hides the person, it is not.
The three labels
PLAIGROUND uses the same three labels on the blog and on upload. The short versions on our labels page are:
- Human: people wrote and performed it.
- AI-assisted: a human made the key creative choices and AI helped.
- Fully AI: generated with little human authorship.
Pick the one that matches the track. Do not pick the one that sounds better in a pitch. A human song that used ordinary tools, the kind producers have used for years to edit and tune, is still a human song if people wrote it and performed it. A track where a tool wrote the melody, sang the lead, or built the record, and a person mostly prompted and picked, is not Human. The middle case is AI-assisted: a person made the key choices, and a tool did a real part of the writing or the recording. There is a longer walk-through in how to label your music.
How a credit line should read
Write the credit in three beats.
- Name the people.
- Say what each person did: lyrics, melody, vocal, an instrument, editing, or choosing the take.
- Give the label. If a tool generated a part, name that part.
These are patterns, not a form you have to copy word for word.
Human: lyrics and melody by the named writers. Performed by the named performers. Label: Human.
AI-assisted: lyrics and lead vocal by the named songwriter. The drum part was generated with an AI tool and is disclosed. Label: AI-assisted.
Fully AI: the recording was generated with an AI tool. The human role was prompting or choosing among outputs. Label: Fully AI.
Notice what is missing. The tool is not given a person's job title. It is described as a tool, on the part it actually made.
What the Copyright Office says about the author line
A release credit and a copyright registration are different pieces of paper. The release credit is how listeners and stores see the track. The registration, if you file one, is the claim you make to the U.S. Copyright Office.
In its March 2023 registration guidance, the Office says people who use AI may claim copyright in their own contribution. It also says applicants should not list an AI technology, or the company that provided it, as an author or co-author simply because they used it. If the AI-generated material is more than minimal, the guidance says to exclude it from the claim and describe it. The Office's January 2025 copyrightability report adds the line that matters underneath: prompts alone, with current generally available tools, do not give the user enough control to count as the author of the output. A human who selects, arranges, or creatively changes that output can still claim the human part.
So the credit and the registration should tell the same story. Name the people for the human work. Do not put the tool in the author slot. Say which part was generated.
Split sheets
A split sheet is the agreement about the song: who wrote it, and what share each writer owns. It is not the same document as the recording credit, but the two should not contradict each other. On a PLAIGROUND release, the writer shares have to add to 100, and delivery waits until the sheet is signed. Co-writers get the sheet by email. That is the process described in split sheets without a lawyer.
Put this on the sheet:
- Every human writer's name.
- What they wrote, lyrics or melody or both.
- The percent each person owns. The percents add to 100.
- The label: Human, AI-assisted, or Fully AI.
- If a tool generated lyrics or melody, say that in the notes.
Do not give the tool a percent. A tool cannot sign a sheet, and the Copyright Office guidance above says not to list it as an author. The shares belong to the people who are actually splitting the song. If a tool wrote all of the song and no person did, say so, use Fully AI, and do not invent a writer to make the math look traditional.
There is a free checklist on the split sheet template, and a longer explanation of what a split sheet is on the guide.
Sources: PLAIGROUND, AI music labels. U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence (March 2023). U.S. Copyright Office, Part 2: Copyrightability (January 2025).