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.
Some of this, says Jen cofounder Shara Senderoff, is to be expected. The tool is in its alpha phase, and the 10-second and 45-second tracks it generates are “meant to inspire and provide a starting point for creativity, not necessarily a final product,” she says. New capabilities are coming, and because Jen was trained using a limited data set, it has room to grow and “will expand significantly in the beta phase,” Senderoff adds.