The AI-assisted badge: What SongBattle's AI-disclosure rule means for artists and for voters

Here is the sentence most artists get wrong about SongBattle's AI rule: answering yes does not get you removed. Answering no when the truth was yes does.

The rule isn't a purity test. Nothing on the entry form asks you to swear off tools, and nothing in the rules ranks a human-only song above an assisted one. What the platform asks for is one honest answer to one question, and then it builds everything else — a badge, a legal representation, a disqualification clause — on top of that answer. Get the answer right and the system is on your side whichever way you answered. Get it wrong and the consequences are the heaviest in the rulebook.

This piece lays the whole policy out end to end: the question exactly as the form words it, what each answer commits you to, where the badge appears and where it doesn't, why the platform doesn't run detection, what happens when a disclosure turns out false, and how a voter should read a purple badge when they meet one.

The question, verbatim

Near the bottom of the entry form, inside its own box, is a required question:

Did you use AI to create any part of this song? Includes AI-generated vocals, instrumentals, lyrics, or the full track. Undisclosed AI use is grounds for disqualification.

Two radio buttons follow:

• Yes — this song was created or assisted by AI
• No — human performance only

You can't skip it. The buttons are marked required in the browser, and if a submission reaches the server without a yes or a no, it's refused with a message that repeats the warning about disqualification. The answer is saved with your entry as a simple true-or-false flag.

Directly below the question is the rights checkbox, and its wording is worth reading slowly, because it's the sentence that turns a radio button into a promise: I own or control the rights to this music (including any beats, samples, and features), my answer above about AI use is truthful, and I agree to the competition rules and terms of service. The checkbox is also required. You can't submit without affirming the AI answer twice.

What a "yes" commits you to

Less than you'd think.

Section 5 of the Official Contest Rules says entrants who truthfully answer yes "remain eligible; the song will simply carry an 'AI-assisted' badge on the artist's profile so voters can decide accordingly." That's the whole consequence. You're reviewed on the same criteria as everyone else, you appear in the same gallery, your votes count the same way, and if you finish first you win the same prize. There's no separate bracket for assisted entries, no scoring penalty, and nothing in the code that treats a yes differently beyond showing a badge.

Which is the case for answering yes whenever you're unsure. The form's scope line covers vocals, instrumentals, lyrics "or the full track," and the Terms of Service put it as material that was "generated or substantially assisted by AI." If a vocal, a beat or a verse was substantially produced by a tool, the honest answer is yes, and the honest answer costs you a small purple label. The dishonest answer costs you everything — and it can cost you after you've been paid.

What a "no" commits you to

Section 5 again: "Your answer is a legally binding representation to the Sponsor." The Terms of Service say the same in Section 2 and spell out what the platform does with it. SongBattle relies on your answer to display or omit the badge, to evaluate any complaint about your entry, and to qualify or disqualify it. An untruthful answer is "a material breach of these Terms."

In plain words: when you select No — human performance only, you are telling the platform, in the form's own phrase, that the performance is human. Not that you didn't use a plug-in, not that you don't like AI — that the vocals, the instrumental and the lyrics weren't generated or substantially assisted by it. If that's true, you're done. If it isn't, you've signed something false, and the rest of this article is about what that triggers.

Where the badge appears, and where it doesn't

A yes produces exactly one visible thing on the site: a small pill on your artist profile page, sitting in the row beneath your song title next to the genre pill. It reads AI-assisted in small capitals, styled in the site's purple rather than its gold, with a four-pointed star glyph in front. Hover and a tooltip explains that the entrant disclosed on submission that the song uses AI vocals, instrumentals or lyrics.

That's it. The badge is rendered on the profile page and nowhere else. It is not on the leaderboard rows, not in the All Artists table, not on the cards in the Vote gallery, not on the homepage features, and not on the "Discover More Artists" grid a fan sees after voting. Only one other badge shares that profile row — the gold "Your song" marker, which only the artist sees on their own device — so the AI-assisted pill isn't lost in clutter when it does appear.

The placement isn't an accident, and it matters for how fans meet the badge. On SongBattle, the profile page is where voting actually happens: the gallery is view-only, and a fan has to open a profile, play the song past the watch gate (the vote button stays locked until 25 percent has played) and add the artist to their ballot there. So every fan who can vote for an assisted entry has, by construction, been on the one page that shows the badge, with the song playing. Nobody votes for an AI-assisted song without having had the chance to know it. And nobody scrolling the leaderboard gets to pre-sort the field by badge, because the leaderboard doesn't show one. The voter's journey walks the whole flow screen by screen.

One edge case the schema is honest about: entries made before the question existed are stored as a "no," because that's the column's default. Those artists never made a representation either way. Their profiles don't carry a badge, but the absence shouldn't be read as a sworn human-only claim.

Why SongBattle doesn't run detection

Section 5 of the rules says it directly: "The Sponsor does not independently verify AI use and relies on entrants' disclosures in good faith." Section 11 of the Terms goes further — SongBattle does not independently verify whether any entry uses AI material, and relies exclusively on each entrant's answer to the question on the form.

There's no detector, no vendor, no accuracy figure, no spot-check. Review is a person listening to an entry against the content rules; it isn't a forensic audit of how a vocal was made. That's a deliberate position, and it has two consequences worth being straight about.

For complaints, it means the platform's starting evidence in any dispute is your own answer. If someone reports your entry and the song turns out to be assisted, the question the team asks isn't "did our tool miss it" — it's "what did the artist select." The disclosure is the record.

For trust, it means the badge is only as reliable as the people answering. The system is built on the assumption that most artists will tell the truth when the truth is cheap and the lie is expensive, and the rules make the lie expensive on purpose. That's the same bet hip-hop has always made about credits: disclosure, not surveillance.

When a disclosure turns out false

This is the stack of consequences the rules and terms attach to a false no. They're cumulative, and none of them has a time limit.

• Disqualification. Section 5 of the rules: an entrant who answers no and is later found to have used AI in the song is disqualified. Section 10 lists "provides false information" as independent grounds; the full list is in who can enter and what gets rejected.
• Forfeiture. You lose any prize you'd have won.
• Return of a paid prize. If the prize has already been paid, the rules say you are "required to return it in full." Being found out after the payout isn't a loophole; it's the scenario the clause was written for.
• Removal, even after approval. Section 10 of the Terms says approval and publication of an entry "does not waive the Sponsor's right to remove it later." Passing review proves the reviewer didn't see a problem. It doesn't certify the song.
• Indemnity. Section 13 of the Terms makes you responsible for defending SongBattle against any third-party claim arising from a false or omitted AI disclosure — including copyright, right-of-publicity, training-data or contract claims about material you didn't disclose. Section 11 states the platform's own "sole remedy" is to remove the entry, disqualify you, recover the prize and pursue that indemnity.

Compare that with the consequence of a truthful yes, which is a badge. The asymmetry is the policy.

Grey areas the rule doesn't adjudicate

The question is one sentence and the scope line is one more. Neither mentions pitch correction, AI-assisted mixing or mastering, stem separation, a lyric-brainstorming session with a chatbot, or a beat bought from a producer who may have used a generator you never saw. Nothing on the site rules on any of those, and this article won't pretend to.

What the documents give you is the frame. The form asks whether AI was used to create any part of the song, and names vocals, instrumentals, lyrics and the full track. The Terms use "generated or substantially assisted." Run your own case against those words, because nobody at the platform will run it for you. Some cases sit close to the words — a tool that wrote half the second verse, a cloned voice standing in for yours — and are hard to read as anything but a yes. Others sit further away — a mastering chain that uses machine learning to set levels — but nothing on the site says where the line is, and this article isn't the one to draw it. Wherever your case lands, the safe move — the one the rules structurally reward — is to disclose. A yes keeps you in the competition with a badge. A no you can't defend doesn't.

If you're buying beats, this is one more reason to ask the producer directly and get the answer in writing; the rapper's guide to buying beats covers the questions that belong in the lease conversation.

How a voter should read it

Three things to hold in mind when a purple pill shows up on a profile.

• It's information, not a verdict. The badge exists so voters can see it and choose. Some fans will skip an assisted entry on principle; some will listen harder out of curiosity. Both are the badge doing its job. There's no official position on which songs deserve your vote — only that you know what you're voting for.
• The badge is the artist's own disclosure. An entrant with the badge made the disclosure the rules ask for. The absence of a badge is a claim — "human performance only" — backed by a binding representation and the consequences above. Read it as a promise the artist chose to make, not as a certification the platform issued.
• The watch gate still applies. Badge or no badge, you have to play a quarter of the song before the vote button opens. The rule nudges you to judge the record you actually heard, and how to judge a rap song gives you a rubric for doing that honestly, whatever was in the signal chain.

Enter honestly, vote informed

Hip-hop has argued about authorship for as long as it has existed. Who wrote the rhymes. Whose record is under the loop. Whether the credits tell the truth. Ghostwriting in hip-hop traces one version of that argument across four decades, and the sampling wars traced another. AI is the newest version, and the culture's recurring answer has been the same each time: not a ban, but a demand to be told.

SongBattle's rule is that answer written into a form. One question, two buttons, a badge for the honest yes and a trapdoor for the false no. If you made the song with help from a tool, say so, wear the pill, and let the crowd decide — the rules protect that choice. If you didn't, say that, and mean it. Either way, the next step is the same: read the question carefully, answer it once, and enter the competition.

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Related:

• How to read the SongBattle leaderboard: What the numbers actually mean (and what they don't)
• What makes a fair fan-voted music competition?