Do I own lyrics I wrote with AI help?

The same rule, applied to words

The human-authorship requirement (Thaler v. Perlmutter, affirmed 2025, cert denied 2026) doesn't distinguish music from lyrics: copyright attaches to human creative expression. Lyrics fall on a spectrum:

• You wrote them, AI suggested a rhyme — clearly yours.
• AI drafted, you substantially rewrote — your rewritten version reflects your authorship; the Copyright Office's registration practice asks you to describe and sometimes disclaim the AI-generated material.
• AI drafted, you pasted verbatim — no human authorship in the text itself; selection of one draft among many, on its own, has not been accepted as sufficient authorship in the registrations that have surfaced publicly.

Note the honest uncertainty: the precise threshold — how much human editing converts unprotected output into protected work — has not been drawn by any court. Current guidance comes from Copyright Office registration decisions, which are agency practice, not binding precedent.

Practical protection

Keep drafts. A version history showing the AI starting point and your transformations is both your registration evidence and your defense if authorship is ever challenged. And the disclosure question is separate from the ownership question — a song with AI-assisted lyrics is squarely "AI-Assisted" under the industry's voluntary labels if the recording is substantially human-made.