kanye westTeenager Teaches A.I.to Rap Like KanyeDavid Z. MorrisA 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.In other words, they’re pretty good rap lyrics.Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter.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:I'll touch every curve of your favorite authorNo more wasting time, you can't roam without CaesarBack when Gucci was the best summer everBefore Cam got the hundred with the peer pressureIt’s not exactly Wallace Stevens—it's hard to find much in the way of consistent themes or narratives in the robot's work.

But the rhymes definitely echoes West at his most wildly free-associative.(And for the curious, “Cam” might be Cam’ron, a now sadly overlooked rapper Kanye collaborated with back in 2007).Barrat has posted a couple of videos highlighting his creation’s lyrics, though he’s quick to point out the A.I.bitcoin manual pdfdidn’t make the backing tracks.best bitcoin ticker iphoneAnd the voice generator he’s using is pretty short on flow, charisma, and even comprehensibility—so far, Barrat’s focus is clearly on words.As Quartz points out, this is about more than just one quirky conceptual project.global bitcoin summit 2014is a hot field right now, crucial to innovations from driverless cars to image-based search.stampare bitcoin

While it’s not ready to put human performers out of work, Barrat’s project is directly relevant to the huge field of natural language processing, ala Siri and Amazon’s Echo.The fact that he did it using free programs, far away from U.S.centers of tech innovation, should give us all a little extra hope for the future.ethereum atm machineBitcoin, ecstasy and the rap group Odd Future sound more like a list of prompts for conversations at Coachella than the inspiration for one of the hottest titles at Sundance, but it’s exactly that strange millennial brew that led Rick Famuyiwa to write and direct the festival hit Dope.The high-energy comedy — which won a special editing award at the festival, and which sold in a reported $7 million deal — was inspired by the 41-year-old director’s internet wanderings.litecoin cpu gpuFamuyiwa, who directed such modest hits as Brown Sugar and Our Family Wedding, hails from the Inglewood section of Los Angeles, and when he saw his old neighborhood featured in videos by the R&B/hip-hop collective Odd Future (which boasts two members from Inglewood), inspiration struck.“It was interesting to see their interpretation of the same neighborhood I grew up in, 15-20 years later, with a completely different voice,” Famuyiwa told Yahoo Movies.ethereum co founder

“[Rapper] Kendrick Lamar, he’s from Compton, and he has a completely different energy than N.W.A.I felt this new generation didn’t feel confined by their neighborhood in the same way N.W.A.[Odd Future] felt very worldly, and I felt that was because of their reach to the rest of the world through technology.”Those tech-savvy musicians — and Famuyiwa’s 14-year-old daughter — helped shape the ambitious, outsider characters at Dope’s core.bitcoin etf youtubeBig-screen newcomer Shameik Moore plays Malcolm, a straight-A student obsessed with ’90s hip hop and its throwback fashion, while Tony Revolori (The Grand Budapest Hotel) and Kiersey Clemons (Transparent) play Jib and Diggy, his geeky best friends and members of his punk group, Aureo.bitcoin dark wikiThey’re constantly online — this is a movie in which major plot points are advanced via viral videos and texts — and use technology to reach beyond the borders of their (often menacing) backyard.

And an entire party scene unfolds entirely through Vines and Instagram photos — which makes perfect sense, given the film’s teen-aged protagonists.“I wanted to highlight how [technology] separates them from previous generations,” Famuyiwa said.“We have a shared language now ….people from Inglewood can still be friends with a kid from Brentwood, because they find a common language.”But social media is just one aspect of Dope’s fresh, of-the-moment take on technology.Malcolm and friends don’t just share selfies and party pictures; they also get heavily involved in the underground world of the so-called “dark web,” where illicit items are bought and sold using Bitcoin and other secret currencies.Famuyiwa, a self-described geek, has long been fascinated by such underground movements, and found a way to fold them into the plot: When Malcolm accidentally gets saddled with several bricks of ecstasy, he and his friends look to unload their illicit goodies online, through secret, encrypted channels.The film’s premiere coincides with the trial over the Silk Road website, which famously provided a secure online platform for what became a vast drug market, giving Dope an indisputably timely feel.

That’s a rarity in film, partly because filmmaking is a tedious, time-consuming endeavor, but also because Hollywood is rarely plugged in to the edgier online underground.While Famuyiwa believes that online currency is here to stay, he was still conscious of integrating the technology in a way that would make movie stand the test of time, even when we’re making online payments with retina scans and Bank of America implants in our brains.“I can still watch WarGames today, even though the technology of WarGames is completely different now, because it still serves the story,” the filmmaker said, referring to the 1983 flick starring Matthew Broderick as a teenaged hacker.“So I didn’t want to shy away from it, even though in a few years it could be obsolete, because I felt it was really more about serving the story than just showing off technology for technology’s sake.”Between the technological terminology foreign to many in Hollywood and the fact that Famuyiwa’s script is about young hip hop-enthusiasts from the parts of L.A.

that industry execs avoid, it was nearly impossible for Dope to get financing; eventually, producers Forest Whitaker (who also narrates the film) and Nina Yang Bongiovi found some money, but far less than Famuyiwa had initially envisioned."Peoplewho are in charge of movies fall back on very old ways of thinking about how movies are made, who and what the subjects should be,” he said.“So they fall into very traditional, old school ways of thinking.Even though a lot of folks are very eager to tap into the millennials, for lack of a better term, they really don’t want to engage them in a way that’s new.”The audience at Sundance, however, clearly plugged into Dope, which led to the bidding war that Open Road and Sony eventually won.Not only did they pay $7 million for the right to distribute the film, they committed to spending $18 million to promote it; much of that spend, it goes to figure, will be to trying to connect the film with the people it portrays on screen.“Once the audience reacted to it, [studios] were able to see that, ‘Oh, okay — there is a way of communicating that we may not understand but should be open to now,” Famiyiwa said.