Lupe Fiasco has been contributing his artistic skills to the field of artificial intelligence. In a recent video on Google’s YouTube channel, Fiasco explores the transformative impact of AI technology on music – particularly rap.

Fiasco is both a rapper and an academic. His goal was to develop a system that emulates his creative process rather than one that automatically generates lyrics by asking users to consider any word or phrase from a variety of angles. This quest resulted in a successful partnership with Google and the PaLM 2 API, which gave rise to TextFX, a collection of AI-powered writing tools for rappers.

TextFX is the brainchild of Google Lab Sessions, an initiative dedicated to exploring how AI can amplify human creativity. The team started by researching Lupe’s lyrical and linguistic strategies before creating this toolkit. They were enthralled by his ability to take language apart and reassemble it in creative ways, frequently creating phrases that have the same sound as a word but have different meanings. For instance, “expressway” might become “express whey,” potentially implying quick delivery of a dairy byproduct.

This got the Google team thinking about how AI could help Lupe and others explore the artistic potential of language and text. For their language-related applications, they turned to large language models like Text Bison, particularly for their text generation and few-shot learning capabilities, which allowed them to train the LLM on a constrained set of examples.

Creating prompts that primed the LLM to act a certain way was an important step. They eventually settled on a prompting formula that begins with a description of the linguistic operation, is followed by examples, and concludes with an incomplete input-output pair that is awaiting the user’s input.

TextFX, the finished product, contains a variety of prompts created to inspire original ideas from any word, phrase, or idea. These include strategies like word explosion into similar-sounding phrases, simile creation, and scene creation inadvertently. Through the interactive platform MakerSuite, which was created for this purpose, users can create and test LLM prompts.

Try TextFX for yourself  HERE