Teenager builds rapping AI by using Kanye West lyrics

Robbie Barrat made the bot for his high school programming class

A teenager has made a rapping AI bot by using Kanye West lyrics.

Robbie Barrat, 17 from West Virginia, recently spoke to Quartz, revealing that he made the AI using open-source software after teaching himself coding.

The rapping bot project arose from a debate in his high school programming club. “All of the sudden I had a week to make a neural network that could rap,” Barrat said.

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Barrat used 6,000 lines of Kanye West lyrics for his AI project, which generates original rap bars. “Originally it just rearranged existing rap lyrics, but now it can actually write word-by-word,” Barrat said.

 

Listen to a sample of the AI-written rap below:

On previous projects he worked on, the teen said: “I got a neural network to write piano melodies. I’ve been trying to get [neural networks] to generate abstract art. I don’t know if you can call teaching a neural network to make rap songs artistic, but I like to think that you can.”

Barrat added of the future of AI: “We’ve got to figure out the way to make more transparent machine learning models. 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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