Lupe Fiasco is not among the rappers who hate the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. Rather, the rap professor is pushing for AI to be included in the songwriting process for rappers.
Fiasco collaborated with Google to create a “Glass of Water” track using TextFX. TextFX is an artificial intelligence-based program that allows a user to input words or phrases, and TextFX, in turn, will generate alternate meanings, phrases, or spellings for the words the user inputs, Afrotech reported.
Fiasco is featured in a GoogleLabs video depicting the rapper working with the program to help him create a new song. Fiasco can be seen describing how it could help improve the songwriting process.
“Depending on what you want to get out of it, it is there for you to get it,” Fiasco said.
“It does require you to do the work; it’s not doing the work for you. It’s just providing you with different opportunities and workflow, and being efficient, and you know, offloading certain things so your mind can focus on other things.”
According to a statement from Aaron Wade, a creative technologist at Google, Google may have misunderstood how Fiasco intended to use the program.
“Initially, we thought that maybe Lupe would want an AI system to write lyrics for him, verses and raps. But it turns out that he didn’t want that at all.”
Wade continued. “What he wanted was a tool that helped him explore the universe of possibilities that can arise from any given word, or phrase, or concept.”
Google may not have seriously engaged with much of Fiasco’s work, as he has long been an artist who has placed a premium on creating universes out of his material. That being said, it will be interesting to see if other rappers are willing to follow Fiasco down this road with AI or if they will continue to shun it because of the potential disaster it could present for the music industry.
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