Watson, the artificial intelligence unit developed by IBM which conquered humanity in a round of Jeopardy! in 2011, is now the co-writer of a pop song. Alex Da Kid, producer of Rihanna's "American Oxygen," and Dr. Dre's "I Need A Doctor," has enlisted the supercomputer to help him compose a song. It's called "Not Easy," which also features X Ambassadors, Elle King, and Wiz Khalifa. Watch the lyrics video above.
In a statement to Mashable, IBM explained that Watson was programmed to research recent global events and culture. Then, it ascertained how human beings were processing this information. "Watson AlchemyLanguage API helped by analyzing five years of natural language texts including New York Times front pages, Supreme Court rulings, Getty Museum statements, the most edited Wikipedia articles, popular movie synopses and more. Once Watson had learned the most significant cultural themes, Watson Tone Analyzer read news articles, blogs and tweets to find out what people felt about them."
An app called Watson Beat allows the user to "teach" Watson what sounds good and create original works based on this musical language. Watson's analysis of thousands of popular songs to find "an emotional fingerprint of music by year" was useful to Alex Da Kid, who used this knowledge to help him write "Not Easy." In an interview with radio host Elvis Duran, Alex Da Kid said "My creative process starts with a conversation. And when I kind of understood what Watson could do, it could kind of take that conversation and that understanding of how people talk to each other and do that on a massive scale."
Watch a short IBM-produced documentary about Alex Da Kid and Watson's collaboration below.
