Raftaar’s ChatGPT Interaction Tells Us A Lot About AI and Indian Hip-Hop Lyrics
The rap star recently posted a video of a screen recording, feeding prompts to one of the world’s most famous artificial intelligence programs
Raftaar takes on ChatGPT in one of his recent video uploads, with funny results.
With the proliferation of artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT and it becoming a crutch for writers and a plaything for others, rap star Raftaar fired up his screen recorder and gave a few prompts to the chatbot, uploading a video in February.
In the video titled “Raftaar vs A.I.” we get three minutes of the hip-hop artist familiarizing himself with ChatGPT’s bot and vice versa. When asked to write a song in the style of the “Swag Mera Desi” rapper, ChatGPT spits out a big blunder – it’s a song entirely in English in which Raftaar is hyping himself up to the hilt.
The rapper’s response was, “But baby I am never going to sing in angrezi.” Understanding the signal, the bot brought out a whole new song, complete with verses, a chorus and an outro in Hindi. It loosely translated into Hindi everything it had just generated in English, so it was plain to see the kind of shortcut that artificial intelligence can take. Raftaar for his part replied and said, “Main khud hi likh leta hoon. Dhanyawaad.” (I’ll write one myself, thank you). He added in the YouTube video upload description, “Tumse na ho paega. Main hi kuch prabandh karta hoon.” (You’re not capable, I’ll manage on my own.)
ChatGPT – which stands for generative pre-trained transformer – has been a boon and bane in the writing world and when you apply it to songwriting, it’s clear to anyone that the creativity is lacking. It’s one of the major criticisms of the program, but there’s still a lot it can accomplish competently.
If you’re a rapper in India and writing in English, ChatGPT can likely help you in the way that it’s helped a lot of writers, given them helpful guiding directions for their work. But remember, there is a total dearth of creativity in ChatGPT’s writing prompts, so you definitely won’t find it conjuring a hard-hitting bar for the next diss song. If you’re planning to make it write rap verses in different languages, good luck finding anything usable.
Stories of struggle and dominance seem to be ChatGPT’s favorite tropes to invoke when it comes to prompts given to write like Indian rap artists include DIVINE and Emiway Bantai. There’s a certain lyrical attitude and persona these AI-generated lyrics exude, but it’s a far cry from the real deal. Given all the safeguards in place, you’re unlikely to find anything really dangerous or threatening in its language. The snarl that drives some hip-hop artists is unlikely to be replicated at all.
As much as we can complain about the repetitive themes that pervade Indian hip-hop at the moment — the resilient ones, the showy bars and more — ChatGPT’s attempts at writing lyrics for Indian hip-hop artists shows that it can get worse but hopefully, it won’t. Here’s trusting our real, human writers to stay authentic in their pen game.
