AI and rap
GTX 1080Ti on the beat
AI is slowly getting involved in all aspects of human existence. Right from deepfakes, surveillance to chatbots not to mention finance. All these aspects were more or less expected as AI would improve. But as time has gone on, we’re seeing its involvement in the more human aspects of things, like art, religion and even fortune telling!
Let’s look at a set of lyrics :
“ Success walked down from heaven to carry three hundred souls
It seems so simple, they all vanish night or day
You wanna be the one Success wants
You wanna be the one Success shows “
Now these lyrics are not the best, they seem like they’ve been scribbled by a high schooler who thinks he’s the next Kanye or by a struggling NYC subway rapper. But in reality, these have been generated by an AI on a website called These lyrics do not Exist. Now the interesting part about the generated lyrics is that they haven’t been generated by random replacement of already lyrics, these lyrics genuinely did not exist before you clicked on the ‘generate’ button. The creator of the website states that the average hit song involves more than five human writers, and that he plans to level the playing field so that artists have an opportunity to write great songs and maximise their lyrical potential. The website states that it could be helpful in tackling writers’ block .
This is functionally similar to This person does not exist which we discussed in another article, and actually there’s a whole host of websites like this covered in an impressive medium article.
DeepBeat — The AI Rapper
Rap consists of intricate structures and complex rhyme patterns which require sophisticated language and lyrical skills to generate: most of us couldn’t freestyle rap to save our lives. Enter DeepBeat, the AI rap lyric generator. DeepBeat tackles the challenge by first looking at rap lyrics and then predicting the next line. These predictions are then combined to merge lines from existing songs into new rhythms. The creator published his research in a paper named ”DopeLearning: A Computational Approach to Rap Lyrics Generation’’. The system also uses AI to suggest lyrics that a human rapper can use in making his or her work more ‘outstanding’.
Launched in November 2015, the platform had generated just 42,000 users by June 2016, with early recordings suggesting that Kanye West needn’t hang up the mic just yet.
In 2017 Ambassador, Elle King, and Wiz Khalifa performed together on Alex Da Kid’s single, ‘’Not Easy’’ which ranked highly in the iTunes chart. The tune was created using IBM’s Watson, which scanned the most popular songs from the last five years as well as analysing news, media, reports, movie scripts and social media posts. The results helped the artists to understanding the ”emotional temperature” of people at that specific time. Watson BEAT even suggested the song’s sound.
We’re all pretty much resigned to the fact that AI will take most of our jobs in the future, but we didn’t expect it to get involved in certain artistic endeavours that we’ve always thought to be inherently human, be it art or music or even lyrics. These things have always been something that add meaning to human life as John Keating said in Dead Poets Society :
“Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
Very soon we won’t be able to distinguish AI poetry from human ones and it will leave us pondering for other avenues that makes us human.
Perhaps we’re surprised because we’ve never focused on the quantifiable and learnable aspect of most things we consider creative. Humans at the end of the day are complex in ways that can be broken down into certain patterns that we’ve been able to figure out and others that we haven’t.
