This AI Was Taught To Rap Using Kanye West Lyrics

We've heard a Christmas song written by artificial intelligence, and we've read depressing poetry written by an AI trained by thousands of romance novels. Now a new AI has surfaced with similar abilities, only rather than writing music or artwork, it has penned its own rap lyrics. How did it gain such unusual (for a machine) skills? By being fed a bunch of Kanye West songs.

While most artificial intelligence like this are created by researchers for the purpose of, well, research, this particular AI was made by a high school student named Robbie Barrat as part of a bet in his school's programming club. Barrat is a self-taught kid from rural West Virginia who used open-source software for his creation.

Though Barrat is learning to use Google's TensorFlow, he used PyBrain for his current work. The neural network was trained to rap using 6,000 lines of lyrics from Kanye West songs; the AI is fairly sophisticated, able to write its own lyrics one word at a time rather than repurposing batches of existing song lyrics. The machine even generates spoken songs with appropriate rap-song-esque pausing.

After enough tweaking and adjusting, the rapping AI is surprisingly capable of producing its own songs. Below is a snippet of a song produced by the AI, with the full lyrics available here. More about the AI itself is available on this Github page:

Bust a playa with the kids I never had

All his time, all he had, all he had, all he had

Most you rappers don't even stop to get the most press kit

Playas is jealous cause we got the whole city lit

But without it I'd be worried if they playing that bullsh*t

You wanna complain about the nights even wilder

I swear to God I hope you have got to hear

I'll touch every curve of your favorite author

No more wasting time, you can't roam without Caesar

SOURCE: Quartz