Generative Art Timeline · Chapter 9: AI Era (2010s)

2016

Neural Network Written Rap Song by Robbie Barrat

Invention · North America · Top Moment

A portrait of Robbie Barrat as a seventeen-year-old, the photograph he supplied for Dave Gershgorn's March 2017 Quartz profile of his rapping neural network; a picture of the artist, not of the work.
A portrait of Robbie Barrat as a seventeen-year-old, the photograph he supplied for Dave Gershgorn's March 2017 Quartz profile of his rapping neural network; a picture of the artist, not of the work. Robbie Barrat, 2017. Photograph courtesy of Robbie Barrat; published in Quartz, 17 March 2017 (Internet Archive).

17-year-old Robbie Barrat created his first AI artwork, a rapping neural network, after a bet in his high school programming club. Barrat, from rural West Virginia, utilized open-source tools like Linux and PyBrain to teach himself coding and AI development. Tasked with proving AI’s capabilities, Barrat wrote and trained a bespoke neural network on 6,000 Kanye West lyrics, transforming it from merely rearranging words to generating original rap lines.

His project highlights the potential of open-source software in democratizing AI learning, showcasing how even those far from tech hubs can contribute to and innovate within the AI field. The work also stands as Barrat’s first experiment with AI art from an early age. This is very much only the beginning of this story for Barrat.

Text by Peter Bauman. Generative Art Timeline, Le Random, fact-checked September 2026.

Sources

People

Kanye West, Robbie Barrat

Movements

Computer Text, Generative Poetry, Generative Writing

Filed under

Ideas
ai art, Computer Text, democratization, education, Generative Poetry, Generative Writing, tools
Technologies
artificial intelligence, Linux, neural networks, open-source software, programming, PyBrain
People
Kanye West, Robbie Barrat
Places
West Virginia

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