A West Virginia teen has created an artificial intelligence bot capable of crafting rhymes using Kanye West lyrics as its data-fueled inspiration. Robbie Barrat, 17, said that a challenge issued by members of his high school programming club led to the creation of the bot, which he says is capable of writing its own raps.
Barrat, who lives on a farm in the state, told Quartz in an interview that the programming club got into a heated discussion about whether or not AI could outperform humans. In just a week, Barrat coded a program to prove his point that AI has possible capabilities to think like a person.
The self-taught Barrat used an open-source coding program PyBrain and is familiarizing himself with Google’s TensorFlow program. Filling the backdrop of these so-called “neural networks,” Barrat’s programming enabled the bot to rearrange 6,500 existing Yeezy lyrics at first but a tweak allowed for the AI to make its own rhyme schemes.
Here’s a verse from Sunday that Barrat posted on YouTube.
And here are the lyrics to the first verse of the track. We’ll let you decide if they outdo West’s.
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 bullshit
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
Back when Gucci was the best summer ever
Before Cam got the hundred with the peer pressure
She walking around looking like Herve Leger
So next time I’m in between but way more fresher
And they say you never know, never never NEVER
“We’ve got to figure out the way to make more transparent machine learning models,” Barrat told Quartz. “If we’re able to make progress into seeing into the thought process of a neural network, I think it’s going to teach us a lot about Go, or language, or the structures that we aren’t able to pick up on yet.”
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Amazingly, Barrat isn’t interested in entering the tech world as his primary focus is pure math. He told the publication that using math, science and the arts in this innovative way is simply a hobby he does after he gets out of school.
