The Hip Hop Poetry Bot
Overview
The Hip Hop Poetry Bot is an AI research project, exploring speech generation trained on rap and hip hop lyrics by black artists. I was given a research grant by Google Artists and Machine Intelligence, and technical collaborators from Google Arts and Culture Lab.
The Hip Hop Poetry Bot aimed to use AI to explore the wealth of this material & present the art forms of rap and hip hop in new ways to the public.
The research project built an algorithm trained on a personal dataset of lyrics, and experimented with using this to generate poetic responses to everyday questions.
However, in order to build the experiment in full at the tiime, it required a large, public dataset of rap and hip hop lyrics on which an algorithm can be trained.
As with much work by black artists, the public archives required to train such an algorithm don’t currently exist.
So I launched it with an open call asking rap and hip hop artists to contribute their lyrics to create a new, public dataset of lyrics by predominantly black artists.
Process
More insight into the project
- Artists Meet Machine Learning — Google Arts & Culture
- Can Artificial Intelligence Rap? — Google Arts & Culture
Credits
- Creative Technologist — Lex Fefegha
- Collaborators — Holly Grimm, Rifke Sadleir, Cyril Diagne, Ross Goodwin & Bastien Girschig
- Producer — Hannah Andrews
- Client — Google Artists and Machine Intelligence & Google Arts & Culture