The New 'Ethical' AI Music Generator Can't Write a Halfway Decent Song Condé Nast, 7/4/2024 Despite being an "ethically trained" AI music generator, Jen falls short in writing quality songs. While it claims to have licensed material, the tracks lack lyrics and don't resemble anything you would hear on the radio. Professional musicians found Jen to be uninspiring, producing music that felt like a trick rather than a cool idea. When the new "ethically trained" artificial-intelligence-powered music generator Jen dropped a couple of weeks ago, it was at a fairly auspicious time: The Recording Industry Association of America had just sued Udio and Suno for copyright infringement, alleging that the programs were trained on copyrighted material without the creators' permission. By contrast, Jen claimed to have licensed more than 40 training catalogs and promised to vet everything that went into, and came out of, its system, to make sure it didn't violate copyright. As other AI music generators were garnering less-than-flattering headlines, Jen was positioned to be an alternative.
Ethics aside, whether or not the music Jen generates stands up is debatable. Tracks generated by the program don't have lyrics, and while its AI was trained on licensed material -- the list of which hasn't been released -- it doesn't seem to be anything you might have heard on the radio. You can't ask Jen to make a Willie Nelson song because it doesn't actually know what Willie Nelson sounds like. (Our attempt to do so produced something that sounded more like trip-hop than anything else.) Even if you sub out Nelson for "outlaw country," a genre that has existed for half a century and has influenced countless landmark LPs, you still just end up with something blandly "country," more easy listening than honky-tonk.
To dig deeper, WIRED asked five professional musicians to test Jen's skills: John Heywood, a bassist who's best known for backing indie rock act Alex G; Wye Oak and Flock of Dimes' Jenn Wasner; Shana Cleveland, founder of surf-noir act La Luz; Steve Reidell, of The Hood Internet and Air Credits; and Allen Blickle, a two-time Emmy-nominated composer and sound designer who has worked on projects for Netflix, Disney, and Apple Music, among others. All five found the program easy to use but inherently uninspiring.
Wasner, who says she's open to the idea of AI as a "tool to help generate ideas," has seen AI programs used in the studio or in a band's writing process before. In her time with Jen, though, she struggled to make anything she could take to heart. "Everything it made seemed like it came from an uncanny valley situation, and while it was fascinating to listen to, it all just felt like a trick, like 'Oh, I can put trap high hats on a bluegrass track,'" she explains. "There was never a point when I thought, 'That's a cool idea.' I always thought, 'I could have come up with something cooler on my own.'"
