If AI Writes Your Hook, Who Owns It?

If AI Writes Your Hook, Who Owns It? This is a question that every Nigerian artist, producer, and songwriter must ask themselves, because the truth is, it can no longer be ignored. 

Let’s be honest, the number of AI creative tools out there is more numerous than can be counted. Whether free or paid, these tools dangle seamlessness, ease, and efficiency as the reward for using them.  

The Scenario

So, you are working on a new song, and you realise that the melody needs a little something, or it just does not sound right yet. A simple prompt into an AI music tool generates a hook, one that you like and feel works perfectly. You take it and build the rest of your song around it. The record drops, it blows up, and now a publisher wants to acquire the publishing rights, but before that, a few minor questions: do you own a 100% of this track, and who actually wrote the hook? You or the AI?

A Different Set of Rules

You might ask why these questions even need to be raised. Is that not “doing too much?” But honestly, why would it not? We are in a time when AI is getting more precise and more embedded in how music is created. At the same time, there is a lot of uncertainty around how its training data is sourced, and that is not going away. For any publisher paying attention, protecting against future litigation is not an abstract notion. What that looks like in practice is scrutinising where songs and the inputs behind them actually come from.

What the Law Says So Far

The aim of intellectual property law has always been the protection of human creativity, and this is especially true for copyright. The goal is to protect creative expressions, ensuring that those who create can benefit from their work. To this end, human persons and legal entities have copyright ownership vested in them either automatically upon creation of the work or by registration. But what happens when the one that created this work is an AI system? 

For Nigeria, the Copyright Act of 2022 simply defines an author as a natural person or a corporate entity, making no mention of machines or AI systems. Additionally, section 2(2) stipulates that in order for a work to be eligible for copyright, some effort must have been expended in making the work, to give it an original character. The degree of this effort was not stipulated by the Act. The law is, so far, silent on AI-generated or AI-assisted works, and Nigeria has no specific AI copyright guidelines to fill that gap.

This is so even as the National Artificial Intelligence Commission (Establishment) Bill was introduced, and the National AI Strategy was adopted. Neither of them directly addresses copyright in AI-assisted creative works. It is such an interesting place to be from the Nigerian standpoint, because on one hand, we acknowledge the existence of AI and the effect it has on the creative space, enough to propose strategies for it. But when it comes to really regulating the use of this technology with detailed laws, policies or at the very least guidelines, it is just quiet. 

Creating with AI in Other Places

Thanks to the internet, the world is a global marketplace, and an artist who wishes to tap into it cannot only be concerned with national legislation. So what is the legal status of an AI-generated work elsewhere?

The U.S.A

In the United States, the Copyright Office has a report that effectively guides it in examining AI-generated material for copyright registration. Under the Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 2: Copyrightability, a work must be authored by a human to qualify for copyright protection, meaning that purely AI-generated works cannot be protected. The policy also confirms that prompts are instructions that convey ideas, not fixed creative expression; as such, they do not provide sufficient human control to qualify as authorship.  

However, this is not absolute and may be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. AI-generated works may be copyright-protected when they fall under certain circumstances, such as when a human provides "expressive inputs," like an original sketch or composition supplied for the AI to modify or performs "creative selection or arrangement" of the AI-generated material.

The U.K

In the U.K., the case is a little different; the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) provides a specific legal framework for computer-generated works. Under Section 9 (3), where a work is created by a computer without a human author, the person who made the "arrangements necessary" for the creation of the work is deemed to be the author. This could be anyone involved in the process, from the user who inputted the prompt to the developer who wrote the code for the machine itself. 

However, there is still an originality standard set for computer-generated works; one that does not necessarily require human creativity, but that must show that a human made the necessary arrangements to generate the work. 

It would seem that in both the U.S and the U.K., for AI-generated works to be eligible for copyright protection, there must be, to varying degrees, some meaningful participation of human efforts and judgment.

Drawing a Distinction between AI-generated and AI-assisted work 

A line is forming, trying to carve out a distinction between a work that is completely AI-generated and one that was drawn from AI outputs, edited, arranged, and shaped through human creative judgment. The consensus? The degree of human involvement is the determining factor for whether that work can be protected by copyright. But what about ownership?

In a human-created work, the logic is straightforward. Copyright vests in the creator of the work, and it is theirs to transfer to another if they so wish. However, as we have seen throughout this post, AI is simply a tool and cannot be regarded as an author in itself. As such, establishing the ownership of an AI’s output has no definitive answer, especially given the ongoing disputes concerning the training of AI models on copyrighted music. Until these issues are extensively explored by case law across jurisdictions, the picture will remain unsettled. 

So, Who Owns It?

On most AI platforms, what users own in the outputs remains largely dependent on each platform’s own terms of service, and even this can be changed and updated as the platform deems fit. For example, Suno’s paid plans for a long time granted users ownership of their outputs and commercial use rights, while Suno retains ownership on the free tier. However, following Suno's licensing deal with Warner Music in late 2025, their terms have been updated. Now, even paid subscribers are generally no longer considered the owners of the songs they generate, although they are still granted commercial use rights. 

The point is that the platform you use, the plan you pay for, and the terms in force at the time you create will determine what rights you hold over an output.

The honest answer to who owns an AI-generated hook is not clear-cut. It will depend on a myriad of elements, from what platform was used to generate it to how much human effort was expended in shaping the final result. When next you type in a prompt, you must consider what authorship and copyright protection will look like for that output.

Consider documenting the creative process and keeping a record of whatever changes you made. It will not hurt to have evidence of your creative input. Also consider the terms of use for whichever platform that you choose, understand whether the platform retains ownership over your outputs and whether commercial use is permitted, and check those terms regularly as these could affect any rights transfer in the future.