17-Year-Old Uses 6,000 Kanye West Lyrics to Build a Rapping A.I. Bot

Kanye West has around nine major, label studio albums depending on if you care to classify collaborative projects such as Watch The Throne and Cruel Summer as strictly Kanye affairs. A West Virginia high school student mined West’s discography to program his own artificial intelligence bot to rhyme on his own, and it appears he followed the age-old mandate by teachers nationwide to show his work.

Seventeen-year-old Robbie Barrat said he had about a week to create a neural network that could rap as part of what was a dare from some classmates in his high school programming club. The resources and results are publicly available via Barrat’s GitHub page along with a brief explanation of how the network operates.

“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.”

That distinction means the bot has its own cadence, although it admittedly comes with the limitations of a monotonic robot voice with pauses between each word.

Barrat says he fed the network approximately 6,000 Kanye West lines using open-source software, Linux, and PyBrain, a neural network powered by the user-friendly programming language Python.

“Originally it just rearranged existing rap lyrics, but now it can actually write word-by-word,” Barrat told Quartz.

Congratulations to @kanyewest on his 7th @RIAA #Platinum album award for ‘Yeezus” – he’s 7 for 7! W @DefJamRecords

— RIAA (@RIAA) January 15, 2014

According to the Recording Industry Association of America, seven Kanye West projects are certified platinum. That commercial influence presumably reaches to West Virginia, where a high school student like Barrat can use lyrics from those platinum albums to have a neural network-powered bot rap about everything from Anna Nicole Smith to Fish Fillets. 

You can view all the specifics of Barrat’s neural network via his GitHub page.

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