Attribution, and the difference between a courtesy and a condition
Attribution can be a request or a condition. In a permissive licence it is a condition, because the grant is conditioned on preserving notices; on a hosted product it is usually a courtesy with no clause behind it. As of 2026-09-22.
| Question | What the phrase answers |
|---|---|
| A permissive weights licence | A condition: notices must be preserved |
| A community licence | Often a condition, in its own wording |
| A hosted product's terms | Usually nothing, or a request |
| A platform disclosure rule | A separate obligation, to the platform |
Inclusion rule. Phrases that appear in more than one vendor's permissions documents and that change what a sentence means. A phrase used by a single vendor in a single clause is described on that vendor's own page instead. Order. Reading order: where you meet it, then what it settles, then what it does not.
1A condition looks like a courtesy and is not
Where a licence says its notices must be preserved and disclaims rights over output subject to compliance, the credit is load-bearing. Shipping without it does not lose ownership of anything and does stop satisfying the sentence being relied on.
For a video pipeline this usually means a line in a credits file or a repository note. The cost is nothing and it does not happen unless somebody writes it into a checklist.
2Hosted products rarely ask
A subscription product has the customer's money and does not need a credit. Where a logo appears on free-tier output it is a watermark rather than an attribution requirement, and it is removed by paying rather than by crediting.
Conflating the two leads to the wrong conclusion in both directions: that a paid plan removes an obligation, or that a credit satisfies a watermark rule.
3Disclosure to a platform is a different obligation
Rules about labelling generated material come from platforms and regulators, not from the supplier's licence. They are owed to somebody else, and satisfying one says nothing about the other.
A register about supplier terms records only the first kind. The second belongs in a publishing checklist, and it changes on a different clock.
4A generator's account of it
Alongside the terms behind “Attribution”, SceneMixer's guides describe the work itself this way:
The photo is cleaned into a product shot and that object appears in every shot.
SceneMixer, An AI Ad for a Physical Product — “Will the product look like my product?” (read 2026-10-13)
The script is written from the photos and the one-line description. In step-by-step mode you can rewrite it before anything is shot.
SceneMixer, How to Make an Ad from One Photo — “Do I need a script?” (read 2026-10-13)
5Where the sourced wording is
A word page, not an entry in the register: nothing above is attributed to any vendor and nothing above is legal advice. The quoted clauses are on commercial use, the column this phrase turns up in is what is owned, and the reading rules are on the reading page. Next words: Provenance, Training data, Opt-out.