Add write pop music hits to the list of things that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can now do. As well as write poetry and novels, AI is now being used to create music by a Grammy-nominee producer, who collaborated with IBM's Watson cognitive computing platform on his newest release. Alex Da Kid used Watson to analyze the composition of five years' worth of Billboard songs, as well as cultural artefacts such as newspaper articles, film scripts and social media commentary. The idea was to understand the "emotional temperature" of the time period, and use this to inform Alex's creative process. I asked him to explain how the insights from the data contributed to the finished work, and he told me "Watson scraped millions of conversations, newspaper headlines and speeches – all of which showed me how emotionally volatile we as humans are and have been, particularly over the last five years."