A GRAMMY still requires a human creator on record

The tool moment

Ahead of the 2024 GRAMMYs, the Recording Academy updated its Awards Rules and Guidelines to directly address AI-generated content for the first time, a change Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. discussed in a 17 June 2023 interview published on the Academy's own site. The new rule, as quoted there, states that “only human creators are eligible” to be submitted, nominated for, or win a GRAMMY Award. For a musician who used an AI vocal model, an AI-generated instrumental part, or generative songwriting assistance somewhere in a track, this is the document that decides whether that record, or which parts of it, can be entered at all.

What the documents show

The current Rules & Guidelines, now in its 69th-Awards edition, sets out the standard in more detail than the 2023 interview did: a work with no human authorship at all is not eligible in any category, while a work that includes AI material is eligible in applicable categories only if the human authorship component is “meaningful and more than de minimis,” relevant to the specific category entered, and credited to a human rather than to the author of any AI material. Mason's interview frames the same distinction in practical terms: an AI voice or instrumentation can be considered, but a songwriting-category entry still needs music or lyrics written mostly by a human. This is the Academy's own credentialing standard, separate from and stricter in some respects than what US copyright law itself requires for registration.

What stays with the musician

The rule does not evaluate whether an AI-assisted contribution is good; it evaluates whether a human's share of the authorship is substantial enough, in the category entered, to make a human eligible for recognition. A musician entering a mixed AI-and-human track still has to be able to describe and, if asked, document which parts they wrote or performed, since the rule explicitly withholds recognition from the AI-generated portion regardless of how the rest of the work is judged.

Judge it by listening

The rule is about eligibility, not quality, so no listening test substitutes for reading it. What a listener or juror can reasonably ask is whether the human contribution the entrant is claiming, in the category entered, is actually audible as a distinct authorial choice, rather than a credit claimed for a part the tool effectively decided.

• In the category this track is entered under, is the human authorship component meaningful and more than de minimis?
• Can the human-written or human-performed portion be described and documented if the entry is questioned?
• Does any AI-generated portion of the work remain correctly excluded from claims of authorship or eligibility?

A GRAMMY eligibility rule and a copyright registration are two different documents asking a similar question in different ways: how much of this did a person actually make. The Academy's answer sets its own bar, higher in places than the law requires, and it is the bar a submitting musician has to clear.