TravisBot - My AI Travis Scott

Using the AI tools available in 2019 (pre-one-click AI voice-synthesis), we created a bot/GAN model to write lyrics based on Travis Scott songs. What it came up with became “Jack Park Canny Dope Man”

The AI came up with that song title, pulled from a 10,000 word lyric sheet of unintelligible and hilarious rhymes it generated.

Then we used AI to generate similar melodies/chords/bass lines/beats to Scott’s productions.

The release of this caused more of a ruckus than I suspected, but was a sign of things to come you could say! The agency I was working for at the time had me work on this in a small team with a designer and an engineer.

Yes we fudged some stuff, (the voice is a rapper named So-So Topic) but the idea was to use AI as a creative tool, not ask AI “Hey go make a rap song” bc that wouldn’t work. It had to be interesting, and at least sort of good, even if the lyrics were nonsense.

Got reviews from Vice, i-D, Complex, Hypebeast, Dazed and Fader, all varying degrees of trying to ride the doom-hype of what this project might mean, while comparing it to the original artist's work. I think Anthony Fantano's review was the most honest and accurate. Sure, it wasn't an exact replica, but the point wasn't to do that, it was to use AI as a tool for new ideas, and seeing how close we could get to the real thing.

Billboard UK quoted me as saying "“We wanted to use AI and deepfake audio in a truly creative way, and not in that doomsday machine-kind of way that everyone was predicting. We wanted to show its potential [as a branding tool].” -which is the first and only time I've ever been quoted by a magazine.

In the end, I think AI is going to amount to a tool, and if people use it to copy the likeness of other things, then it really is nothing more than elevated fan-fic.