Two weeks ago, record company Hallwood Media signed a deal with Telisha “Nikki” Jones after negotiations that purportedly included an offer of $3 million, Billboard reported. Jones is a Mississippi-based lyricist behind the R&B artist “Xania Monet” whose most popular song on Spotify racked up over 1 million listens, and whose Reels regularly top 100,000 views on Instagram – despite her likeness, vocals, and music being AI-generated.

Multiple copyright experts speaking with The Verge have been quite clear: the law is not at all settled but generally one cannot copyright AI-generated works by themselves without human intervention, but you may be able to secure copyright where there are human-made expressive elements, which in this case are the lyrics. So, what exactly is Hallwood Media buying? What can they license? What does this mean for the future of music as a sellable product? The more questions we asked, the more it became evident that we’re facing a cultural shift in the wake of the flood of AI-generated content. The law is just trying to keep up.

Though the final payout amount for the record deal is unclear, it seems fairly obvious – but not explicitly labelled – that Monet’s avatar on Instagram and album covers is AI-generated. If you look closely at her videos, you can even sometimes see her fingers blob together.

Monet’s music, on the other hand, is somewhat passable, likely due to the vast amount of material the AI model was trained on. Jones prompted the music with the AI music generator Suno, one of the two popular AI music generators currently being sued by a trio of major record labels over alleged “en masse” copyright violations. In response to the 2024 lawsuit brought against it, Suno acknowledged in a court filing to using music found all across the internet to train its model.

Jones’ manager Romel Murphy claims that other record companies backed away from Jones after learning that Suno was used to create the songs. When asked about the possibility of copyright infringement, Jones’ manager, Murphy, directed the question to their lawyer, who declined The Verge’s request for comment.

Hallwood Media seems to have put itself into a dubious position. While a record deal implies that Monet is potentially a money-making product, current copyright protections only potentially cover the human-made expressive elements, which, as far as we are aware, are only Jones’ human-written lyrics. If not human-made expressive elements, the copyrightability of the rest of the music — the composition and full sound recording, which includes vocals — is not subject to copyright if entirely generated by Suno.

A lack of copyright protection does not stop anyone from selling their art or music, Kevin Madigan, SVP of Policy and Government Affairs at the Copyright Alliance told The Verge. They just might not have any way to enforce a copyright claim if someone rips the music and uses it in a commercial, for example.

A savvy buyer who knows about copyright law will question why they should purchase something when they can get it for free, Madigan said, asking, “Well, why am I paying you for this, if you have no claim in the copyright?”

On Monet’s Apple Music profile, Monet is credited with vocals and engineering and production, while Jones is credited as the lyricist. (Apple Music and Spotify did not respond to requests for comment.) But the credits by themselves are not dispositive – for enforcing one’s rights through litigation, it’s often the copyright registration that is key. No copyright registrations appear on the US Copyright Office’s online database under the names of “Telisha Jones” or “Xania Monet” as of yet.

US Copyright Office public affairs specialist Nora Scheland reiterated to The Verge that only human authorship can be granted copyright protection. In the case of an AI-assisted work, only the human-made elements can be registered for copyright protection, and as of today, over a thousand works have been partially copyrighted this way. The office does not comment on specific copyright claims or cases, but according to its latest guidance released in January, prompting an AI system does not give human users authorship of the output. Keith Kupferschmid, CEO of the Copyright Alliance, told The Verge as much: “If a human did it, it’s protected, if an AI did it, it’s not. I mean, that’s the ultimate line.”

In the case of Monet, the music is supposedly the output from an AI system, which, if true, means that the music would not be copyright protected. That leaves the lyrics. Record companies commonly sign songwriter contracts. Murphy directed questions about contract details to Hallwood Media, which did not respond to The Verge’s multiple requests for comment.

Similarly, Murphy did not specify if Jones did any singing at all before using a Suno template that “you put on your voice” to generate songs with her lyrics. Murphy contends that AI is another tool available to musicians, like autotune: “She’s using AI as a tool, which is what it was intended to be used for.”

But autotune and AI is a “spurious comparison,” George Howard, a professor of music business and management at Berklee College of Music, told The Verge. Autotune is much more similar to simple reverb, he said. The key concern around AI music generators is the training data used to make the AI models within platforms like Suno, Howard said.

We are in an era of “unsettled” law regarding copyright protection, Howard said. Congress is taking notice of the concerns of copyright holders about AI models feeding off their work. In July, Senator Peter Welch introduced a bill allowing copyright holders access to AI models’ training records to see if their work is being used.

“There are efforts at hand, but you have to always remember that law lags culture,” Howard said. “As technology moves faster than law can accommodate, there’s this sort of lag between the settled law and the technology, and that’s where we are right now.”