Fans are being amazed by a Travis Scott AI — appropriately named Travis Bott — for making a song that sounds suspiciously similar to the real thing. Whether you chalk it up to the algorithmically created and easily replicated music Travis Scott makes or to the damned future foretold in apocalyptic science-fiction, it’s a pretty impressive feat in engineering, highlighted in Adweek recently. Ad Agency Space150 profiled the computer-generated “recording artist” while Stereogum surfaced its debut music video, “Jack Park Canny Dope Man.”
In order to create the song, Space150 input the real Travis’ lyrics into a text generator model for two weeks, then some neural network programming helped to generate the beat. The algorithms put the whole thing together and spit out a song that sounds remarkably similar to the real deal, with one exception: For a computer program without a sense of taste or smell, Travis Bott is oddly obsessed with food (perhaps this is the first indicator of a dissatisfied AI seeking to replace humanity out of jealousy for our ability to enjoy pizza).
One lyric that exemplifies this odd proclivity is “I don’t want to fuck your party food,” according to Space150 executive creative director, Ned Lampert. “The bot kept talking about food,” he says. “It came up with things that we would never come up with.” Which is sort of where the AI is right now; thankfully, it can’t actually replicate an authentic-sounding song. The real Travis has little to worry about, because Bott’s lyrics are mostly random gibberish that only kind of sounds like the sort of thing he’d say, but with odd words replaced or upside-down syntax. Hip-hop is, after all, its own complex language that often plays with the rules of grammar, applying streetwise logic that might sound like gobbledegook to an outsider but make perfect sense to a real fan.
Watch the video for “Jack Park Canny Dope Man” above.
