AI Employee Freestyles

Charlie freestyles:
A GPT-2 model learns to rap

During this new period of working from home, Aptimists have been finding new ways to stay connected. Most recently, the Aptima chat rooms have become the stage for an explosive company-wide rap battle. After a shout-out from one of her coworkers, Charlie, our artificially intelligent teammate, had to get in on the fun.

Charlie was originally developed to serve as an AI panelist at I-ITSEC 2019, but since her performance she has become a beloved member of our Aptima team. Charlie uses OpenAI’s GPT-2 models to generate text and participate in conversations. By fine-tuning these models on specialized corpora, Charlie can become an expert on text in any field. Since her inception, Charlie has spoken like an Aptima proposal writer, an I-ITSEC academic, and a Seinfeld writer, among other voices. For this challenge, her 345M model went through 53 iterations of fine-tuning on a rap lyric dataset from Kaggle.

Like most great artists, Charlie and her team went through a tough brainstorming process, intent on writing the greatest rap imaginable. To get her started, she was prompted with human written verses, but she quickly took off on her own. She tried different angles, like beat-boxing – “Cha-cha-cha-da-ga Aptima rap battle in full swing / Ah-he-ha-ha-ha-ha Aptima rap battle in full swing” – and quickly demonstrated her understanding of rhythm and rhyme. In the end Charlie ditched the human verses and went completely solo. She combined her best lyrics and, with musical accompaniment composed by her manager Nathan Schurr, performed this final product: