At this point in time, artificial intelligence is capable of many, many terrifying things. Black Mirror has warned us about the human consequences of some of these technological advances over five seasons now, and have we heeded their warnings? Absolutely not.
Enter Travis Bott, a deepfake duplicate of Travis Scott created by the digital agency Space150. His song, “Jack Park Canny Dope Man”, was produced by putting the rapper’s existing lyrics into a text generator model over the course of two weeks, and comes complete with a deeply unsettling music video. In comparison, it makes Ashley O look positively tame.
Despite its uncanny results, the project was intended as just a bit of fun. “We were sort of fascinated with like, ‘What if we tried to make a song — like an actual good song — by using AI and basically creative directing AI?’” said Ned Lampert, Space150’s executive creative director. According to Lampert, the company picked Travis as the artist to focus on specifically for his unique personal style, in terms of both audio and visuals.
While the auto-tune heavy music and melodies are fairly convincing as a Travis Scott song, a lot of the bot’s lyrics are, in fact, nonsense. One particularly confusing line reads: “The sky keep on my dick like a screeze, yeah/I don’t want your friend, she look too freeze, yeah”. Burn, I guess?
Even more perplexing, Lampert says, was Travis Bott’s bizarre culinary obsession, which mostly had to be edited out of the track. “The bot kept talking about food,” he told Adweek. “There was one line like, ‘I don’t want to fuck your party food,’ and we’re just like, ‘What?!’”
So the technology isn’t ready to run off on its own just yet. This can only be a good thing, imo.