Meet JEN - An Ethical Generative AI Music Platform

Another Generative AI music platform? Yes. Meet JEN. Like the many other platforms out there, JEN can create music based on text prompts however they put copyright compliance, transparency and compensation of artists front and center. According to their website, “every training input and generative output is vetted for audio recognition and copyright identification utilizing a database of 150M tracks. Jen creates a cryptographic hash for each track, ensuring the integrity and timestamp of the track’s creations.” It is great to see this push for a more ethical approach to generating music with AI. JEN has posted a training doctrine on their website that looks like this:

Pretty cool. It’s the first time I’ve seen one of the platforms do anything like this. Perhaps it’s in reaction to the lawsuits against other platforms, or perhaps they really are dedicated to a more ethical approach. Time will tell.

Anyway, I played around with the site for about 30 minutes and I have to say, it is pretty impressive. Just like other platforms, it spits out music based on your text prompts. When you sign up for a free account, you get 300 credits. Each 45 second piece of music costs 3 credits. I have been listening to a lot of Phish music lately, so I decided to ask JEN to create some music in their style. This is the result:

Here is what I got:

And this is what it sounds like:

Not bad! As far as I can tell, it doesn’t do lyrics or vocals yet, though it does clearly say that this is the Alpha version so maybe that’s coming down the road. When I asked JEN to create a folk singer songwriter style song about growing up in Vermont (my wife LOVES Noah Kahan and we’ve been listening to a lot of it lately), this is what it generated:

Definitely has that Noah Kahan feeling!

As far as using a tool like JEN in the music classroom, I think one of the most interesting things to do is to have students (or the teacher) enter the exact same text prompts into various tools to hear what they come up with. Compare and contrast the results. Ask students which tracks they prefer and why. Start a discussion about the ethical issues with generative AI and see what the students think. Ask them to then compose their own music based on the same text prompts using the AI results as inspiration OR do this is in reverse order and give all of the students the same text prompt to compose a 30-second clip and then ask these AI music tools to do the same. I would be really interested to see the results of any of these ideas.

If you use any of these platforms with your students, I would love to hear what they think of them and HOW you are using them. I am quite certain that when the new school year starts in a few weeks, many of the students will have been using these tools to make their own creations.