Pop Star Algorithms: Why AI Will Soon Make Better Music Than Humans

In February 2020, the digital media agency Space150 experimented with artificial intelligence machine learning programs to create the excellently titled "Jack Park Canny Dope Man," a banger of a hip-hop song in the vein of one of the genre's biggest names, Travis Scott. The neural networks used to craft the tune were trained on Scott's entire catalog, and the resulting beat and melody don't do anything to betray their artificial origins. The song lacks the awkward, clunking approximation of what a human operator would produce, something we so often see in language translation software, for example. No--it sounds surprisingly good, a song a Travis Scott fan wouldn't think twice about if it randomly showed up on their Spotify or SoundCloud weekly playlist. Not until they put a close ear to the lyrics, that is, which you can find over at the song's Genius lyric page.