17-Year- Old Builds Rapping A.I. Bot Using Kanye West Lyrics

With the development of technology, practically anything is just a click away. Between YouTube how-tos about making the perfect dish, or fixing your car with a quick hack, you can pretty much find a tutorial for anything you need on the internet. But what happens when technology meets pop culture?

Robbie Barrat, a 17 year old West Virginia native, is a self taught coding genius that and built a bot that is able to rap after Barrat input over 6000 Kanye West’s lyrics. This all is possible because of rapidly progressing artificial intelligence & what Barrat likes to call “Neural Network Written Rap.”

This project began as a debate regarding whether it's possible for Artificial Intelligence to work better and be more efficient than humans. Driven by a dare given to Robbie by his classmates in his high school programming club,”he had a week to prove this”, and was able to do this before the club's next meeting.

“It’s a neural network that has been trained on rap songs and can use any lyrics you feed it and write a new song,” Barrat wrote.”It now writes word by word as opposed to line by line.”

He got the full AI researcher experience upon realizing that his data wasn’t formatted correctly that ultimately led to the algorithm spitting out “garbage.” That’s when he realized that neural network is much tougher than he thought.

Barrat said he fed approximately 6000 Kanye West lines using open-source software, Linux and PyBrain, while the neural network is powered by user-friendly programming language Python.

Barrat told to Quartz “Originally it just rearranged existing rap lyrics,but now it can actually write word-by-word”. He also said “We’ve got to figure out the way to make more transparent machine learning models.”

You can learn more about Robbie’s work via his GitHub page

H/T: Fact Mag