Originally Posted by Mike. R.
I was meaning more along the lines of a previous statement which said that PROs may insist on knowing if AI was used in any part of the song.
Ah, thanks for the clarification.

Rodger Brown's comment was speculation.

From a legal point of view, songs created by AI can't be copyrighted. That puts them in the public domain, free to use.

However, only the lyrics of the song would be public domain. So if you wrote a song using those lyrics, all the other elements of the song would not be in the public domain.

For example, look and songs that Janice and Bud release. Even though the lyrics are in the public domain, they've created versions that are often made unique by re-working the lyrics, arrangement, and harmonies. So they own that particular version of the song, including the mechanical and sync rights.

Plus, any changes to public domain lyrics are copyright the person who made the changes.

So even if someone knows that the lyrics were generated by AI, unless they know for sure that all the lyrics were the product of AI, using the lyrics would be a risky proposition. More on that later...

Originally Posted by Mike. R.
"Created" is also nebulous unless it means in entirety, in which case, that's another can of worms.

Does the fact that a human "created" the prompt, count? Or, are we saying that the "machine" decides one day to write a song unsolicited and send it to me?
IANAL, but I suggest that even though a human created the prompt, the courts are likely to find that the AI would have created the lyrics. That's because:

1. The ideas at the prompt aren't likely to be original; and even if they were,
2. The AI can generate hundreds of different songs from the prompt, demonstrating what makes each song original is the work by the AI, not the prompt.

In any event, it would be safest to treat AI lyrics the same as public domain lyrics.

Originally Posted by JoanneCooper
3. I use chat gpt to generate some lyrics and change them a bit (or a lot)
How would they know the difference? It is just text in a notepad. It is not a picture
However, OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, keep a log of your conversation history, including "your email address, device, IP address and location, as well as any public or private information you use in your ChatGPT prompts."

So if there were a lawsuit claiming that song lyrics that an author claimed to own the copyright to were actually public domain, they could be compelled to produce the AI lyrics - even if they lyrics were generate via a third party tool such as your own.

Again, IANAL, but if you wanted to use AI lyrics for inspiration, but wanted to hold the final copyright, it would make sense to keep the original version of the AI lyrics, and make sure the final version was sufficiently different.

As John Lennon commented when George Harrison got sued for the melody of "My Sweet Lord" infringing on the "He's So Fine":

Originally Posted by Far Out Magazine
Lennon, while critical of Harrison, was well aware of how easy it was to accidentally mimic another song: “In the early years, I’d often carry around someone else’s song in my head, and only when I’d put it down on tape — because I can’t write music — would I consciously change it to my own melody because I knew that otherwise somebody would sue me,” John said in 1980. “George could have changed a few bars in that song and nobody could have ever touched him, but he just let it go and paid the price. Maybe he thought God would just sort of let him off.”
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-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?