Teenager Teaches A.I. to Rap Like Kanye

A 17-year-old from West Virginia has used an archive of Kanye West lyrics to train a neural network to write rhymes on its own. The results are braggadocious, intermittently obscene, frequently incomprehensible, and laced with nonsensical name-drops. The rapping robot was created by Robbie Barrat, who told Quartz that he put it together in a week, at the urging of his high school programming club, using the open-source software PyBrain and a Linux laptop. Most impressive of all, this is apparently Barrat's first working AI. Here's one choice sequence of Barrat's creation going to work: No more wasting time, you can't roam without Caesar It's not exactly Wallace Stevens--it's hard to find much in the way of consistent themes or narratives in the robot's work.