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Listen To An AI Rap Based On Kanye West’s Lyrics

A West Virginia teen built a rapping robot in one week.

March 17, 2017

One week in his high school programming club, Robbie Barrat, a 17-year-old from rural West Virginia, was a part of a debate about the potential of artificial intelligence to outperform humans. By the next week, he'd built a program that could rap on its own.

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Using an open-source machine learning library called PyBrain, the first version of his code was able to rearrange existing rap lyrics into new sequences. But 6,000 Kanye West lines and a few days later, the program can now write bars all its own. While it's definitely not rapping quite as well as most bona-fide human rappers just yet, it can recite its bars (mostly) on-beat, incorporating pauses for rhythmic effect.

Read more about Barrat's creation over at Quartz, and check out an example of the fruits of his labor below.

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