Science Friday - AI And Hip Hop, Self-Planting Seeds, Abortion Pill Facing Restrictions. Feb 24, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

A Medication Abortion Drug Faces Potential Nationwide Restriction A federal court case underway in Texas this week could have big implications for medication based abortion care across the U.S. The case involves the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone, which is used as part of a two-drug combination in most medication abortions. The plaintiffs in the case are arguing that the FDA went against its own guidelines regarding drug safety when it approved the medication in 2000, though the overwhelming evidence has shown the drug to be safe and effective. A ruling against the FDA could result in mifepristone prescriptions being banned nationwide. Maggie Koerth, senior science writer at FiveThirtyEight, joins John Dankosky to talk about the case and its implications. They also tackle other stories from the week in science, including investigations of the Earth’s inner core, a timeline for astronauts on board the ISS, and efforts to understand what “burnout” actually is.   A New Twist On Sowing Seeds Imagine sowing a handful of seeds on the ground—but instead of needing planting help from a rake or hoe, the seeds can determine for themselves when the ground is fresh from the rain and ready for planting, and burrow their own way into the damp soil. Some seeds, including varieties of Erodium species, can actually do that. They use their self-burying ability to adapt to arid climates. But in a recent study in the journal Nature, researchers describe a package, or wrapper that can give other kinds of seeds self-burying powers as well. The design adapts some of the shapes and techniques used by Erodium into a biodegradable corkscrew made of engineered wood, that can respond to moisture and uncoil to slowly drill a seed into receptive soil. Dr. Lining Yao, co-author of that report and director of the Morphing Matter Lab in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, joins guest host Regina Barber to describe the seed delivery system, and what remains to be solved before it can be used in the wild.   A Long History Shadows New Fight Over California’s Shasta Dam A few years ago, I stumbled onto the story of the Winnemem Wintu people, an indigenous people of Northern California. Theirs is an epic tale and it grabbed hold of me. For several years, I tagged along with them whenever I could. I was around so much, they started teasing me. The large fuzzy windscreens of my recording setup earned me a nickname. The Winnemem Wintu and their close friends call me and my microphone Gray Squirrel. Nickname aside, I never took it lightly that the Winnemem Wintu let me into their space. For good reasons, many Native people are suspicious of outsiders. I understood their openness was special and rare. My greatest hope is that you will hear their story of struggle and resilience, of betrayal and a willingness to still believe in the good things to come – and that it will change you as it did me.Behind the Chief we see the top of Shasta Dam’s immense concrete spillway set against a background of dry, rolling hills. Shasta Dam stands 602 feet high. It’s the country’s 8th tallest. It turned California into the giant, agricultural engine that it is today. It also left a legacy of harm when it flooded the Winnemem and other Wintu people off their land. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.   Rapper And Scholar Sammus Confronts AI In Hip-Hop Over the last six months, there’s been a lot of movement and discussion about the effects that generative AI will have on visual art and writing. But what about its effects on music—in particular, hip-hop? A few years ago, a deep fake of Kanye West rapping a verse from “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen went viral. It was created with just a few clicks using the program Uberduck, which can output AI-generated raps from text of the users’ choice. And it turns out that the rhythmic qualities that make hip-hop performers’ verses so spellbinding is exactly what makes them easier to mimic in deep fakes, as opposed to other genres of music. Guest host Regina Barber talks with rapper and music, science, and technology scholar Dr. Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, also known as Sammus, about the unexpected crossovers between hip-hop and the growing field of generative AI. She is also an assistant professor of music at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. And I'm Regina Barber, scientists and residents at NPR's Daily Science Podcast Shortwave. Later in the hour, we'll hear about seeds that can plant themselves, and I'll talk with rapper Samis about AI-generated music. We'll also hear about the conflict between the Winnomim Wintu tribe in northern California and plans there to raise the height of the Shasta Dam. But first, a court case in Texas this week could have big implications for Medicaid based abortion care in the U.S.

It involves the FDA's approval of the drug Mithopristone, which is used as part of a two-drug combination in most medication abortions. Joining me now to talk about this and other science news of the week is Maggie Kerth. Senior science writer at 538, she's based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Maggie, welcome back to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. So Maggie, tell me about this court case. What's at issue here?

Yeah, so this is a court case in Texas. it could lead to medication abortions being banned nationwide. And a ruling could come down as soon as today. And it's a very science-centric kind of situation, at least sort of. The plaintiffs are suing the FDA, and they're alleging that the agency ignored sound scientific practice and its own guidelines when it approved the drug Mithopristone for sale more than 20 years ago. Now, like you said, Mithopristone is part of this two-drug regimen that makes up a medication abortion. So patients take it first, and it blocks the uptake of progesterone, which makes uterine lining start to break down, the embryo detaches, and then patients take misoprostol, which is a drug that softens and opens

the cervix and starts contractions. Taken together, that regimen is more than 90% effective in the first nine weeks of pregnancy. And this type of medication abortion has become very common in the U.S., right? Yeah, over the last 20 years, it's become really common. It accounts for more than half of all abortions, and that was even before the Dobbs decision. So it might actually be even more of them now that getting in for a surgical abortion is harder because there's fewer places. So you've already said, Maggie, that this regimen is more than 90% effective in what it's trying to do in the first nine weeks of pregnancy. This case is over the alleged safety review for the drug. So what do we know about how safe it really is? Well, it's been shown to be quite safe. So one of the

most rigorous evaluations in the United States, which involved more than 50,000 Californians, found that less than half a percent of them suffered any major complications that required hospitalization, surgery, or blood transfusion. And an FDA analysis of potential Mithopristone complications over 18 years found just 24 deaths out of nearly 4 million users. And that includes, like, deaths had to be reported, even if they didn't have anything to do with taking the drug. So that includes people who were murdered or had drug overdoses that had nothing to do with Mithopristone. And even at that 24 deaths out of 4 million users, that's a lower death rate than penicillin, then Viagra, and then full-term pregnancy itself. Wow. So the numbers seem to be pretty

straightforward here. What exactly is the case that's being made in court? So this is where things get a little messy. These claims are not new. They've been lodged against the FDA frequently enough over the last two decades that there are two separate reports from the government accountability office, which is the independent watchdog agency that investigates the government for Congress. And both of these reports found that the FDA had followed its own guidelines. It had followed proper science when it made some of these decisions. But this lawsuit is about a lot of these technical details, and it's really about what is safe enough and what that actually means, which becomes something that's particularly complicated, given that it's

any drug safety is a subjective value. And it's really about this balance between benefit and risk. So if you are someone that thinks abortion has no benefit, as the plaintiffs and possibly the judge does in this case, then Mithopristone might never be safe enough. So then what exactly happens if the judge rules against the FDA here? Is it banned everywhere across the U.S.? Sales would have to stop in the whole U.S., yeah. But that definitely wouldn't be the end of the story. The case would be appealed for sure. Well, we'll keep watching this story, of course, in the weeks to come. Let's move on. And a few weeks ago, Maggie, we talked about some seismic research into the motion of the Earth's core.

And now there's new information about the core actually having another core. I know. Yeah, this is so great. Like, I thought it made me think about that old Tutsi Pop commercial of like, one, two, three. So, but scientists are arguing over how many layers there are to the Earth. And traditionally, you've probably heard four. crust, mantle, outer core, inner core. But in recent years, some scientists have come up with this theory that there is an inner inner core also. And the theory is based on how these earthquake waves change as they travel through the center of the earth. Scientists can detect the remnants of big earthquakes on the exact opposite side of the world and the changes in the waves compared to where they started. Tell us something about what kinds of material they're moving through. This new study is looking at these waves in a new way and it's taking advantage of a growing. number of seismic instruments around the globe to track quake waves not just once, but as they kind of bounce around the planet's inside. And they found that the very center of the core has a bigger impact on slowing waves down than the outer part of the center of the core. Now, that doesn't mean that the innies have won this debate. A lot of this boils down to this very,

I hesitate to say pedantic argument about whether there are two distinct layers of the inner core or whether it's more like a single thing that's just gradually a little bit different as you get deeper. But it's all the happy result, I suppose, all this uncertainty of much better technology that's helping us detect earthquakes. Right, yeah. It's like we've got really cool new seismic technology and we have it in a lot more places and that's good regardless of what's happening on the her of the earth. And by the way, kids, in case you don't know what Maggie's talking about around the Tootsie Pop, you can look up the old commercial on YouTube. It's still there. Trust me. So let's go from the core of the planet to way up above the planet. There's an update now on

the International Space Station. Tell us more. Yeah. So there's currently some astronauts stranded on the ISS, and they're going to be stuck there until at least September. This team consists of two Russians and an American astronaut named Frank Rubio. And they got to the ISS back in September. of 2022, and they were scheduled to come home this March. But in December, the ship they came in on was found to have a coolant leak, probably caused by an impact with a teeny, tiny little meteoroid. That ship is now going to go back home alone, uncrewed. And instead, the Russian Space Agency is launching a new ship, probably today, that will both restock the ISS with food and supplies and be capable of ferrying those astronauts home. But the Russian Space Agency is also saying that

they're going to be up there for a lot longer than originally planned. This week, they announced that the crew won't return until next September. Oh, wow. But does being up there that long pose any difficulties for the astronauts at all? So if they end up staying up there until next September, they now have a chance of breaking some records for the longest stay on the ISS. Currently, that's held by an American astronaut named Bark Banda Hai, who landed last March after a 355-day mission.

So there have been Russian astronauts that stayed in space longer, but they were on the old mirror space station. And we know from studies on people like Mark Vandaai that staying in space for a year can have some serious impacts on your body. You know, these folks have experienced things like weight loss and immune system changes, vision problems, and even damage to DNA. Okay, so we've got some more mundane news here, but stay with us. And this isn't as exciting as the Earth's core or people floating around in space. It's about a squabble in the scientific publishing world, but it's actually kind of a big deal. Maggie. Yeah, so this is really interesting. Journalist Martin and Serenck at Science is reporting that the proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences, this is a journal, has refused to

retract a paper that has been judged to be fake. Now, this paper is by a researcher from the University of Delaware, and it had found that anemonee fish can tell whether or not coral reefs are healthy. But it came under fire when a whistleblower included it in a set of questionable research. And this investigation done by the University of Delaware after that found that it's really unlikely that the researchers could have completed the 1,800 trials, each taking nine minutes that they claim to have done in the 13 days that they claim to have done it in. It seems like just the math doesn't hold up there, right? The math was not math. So the university actually asked for this paper to be

retracted. And then another paper by the same authors was found to be definitely faking data, and it was retracted by the journal Science. But this one so far has dodged a bullet because the authors corrected it to say that, oh, wait, sorry, it actually took us 33 days to do those experiments. And if that sounds a little fishy, well, it sounded that way to whistleblowers, too. So explain a little bit more about what the journal's doing here. Like, why don't they just retract it or put some sort of a warning label on it or something? Well, what they told science is that basically with that correction made, they couldn't prove the experiments were impossible to have done.

And so they're not retracting it because it can't be proven to be fake because the correction made it plausible. Interesting. Okay. All right. Well, I don't know about you, Maggie. It's been quite a week here. We've had a lot going on.

And I'm feeling a little bit burned out. And researchers are actually trying to figure out what exactly that means when we say, ugh, I'm feeling really burned out. What do they find? Yeah, this is great because it's very much a like, have you ever really looked at your hand kind of situation. You know, research has suggested that we're all increasingly burnt out. Like people report this. But what's really wild about this phenomenon, right?

Sujada Gupta and science news is that researchers are not totally sure what burnt out actually means. So there's some big debates in the world of science. about how to define this and how to measure it, even though it's a feeling that so many people report sharing. So we don't really know, is it a physical thing, a mental thing? I know we feel it in a lot of different ways, but what do we know? Well, you know, because definitions and measurements aren't consistent, the results of research aren't either. So Gupta found that estimates for the prevalence of physician burnout, for instance, varied from zero to 80.5 percent. And like,

what do you even do with data like that? That's too big of a spread to know what kind of a problem you have or how to fix it. And the fixing is its own problem. So scientists are apparently knee deep in this debate about whether burnout is a situational thing that needs to be fixed with like fewer Zoom meetings or whether it's just a diagnosable mental illness akin to a different form of depression. It seems though that this is a line of inquiry, a line of investigation that That's really important. So many people are reporting this, obviously, in our lives. But it feels, Maggie, like post-COVID and everyone being locked up at home, there really is a different way of thinking about burnout, about how much we work, how much effort we put into our lives.

It seems like a really important thing to be studying right now. Yeah, I think so. I mean, and it seems like an important space to get our heads wrapped around. And it's really interesting to me that it's, it's. something that hasn't been figured out before now. Maybe it just took enough people talking about it. Yeah, I think enough of us are talking about it. Well, it's Friday, so at least we get to relax for a couple days. Maggie Kerth is senior science writer at 538. She's based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Thanks so much for being with us today and for bringing us all these stories, Maggie.

Thank you so much. When we come back, Regina Barber gets us ready for some spring planting with a bit of a twist. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. And I'm Regina Barber. Maybe you're looking ahead to some spring gardening. Well, there's a new twist to planting, a twist from the seed itself. Imagine sewing a handful of seeds on the ground, seeds that can determine for themselves when the ground is ready for planting, fresh from the rain, and can burl their own way into the damp soil. Some seeds can in fact do that themselves and use that ability to adapt to air-aird climates. But in a recent study in the journal Nature, researchers describe a package or wrapper that can give other kinds of seeds self-borrowing powers via a biodegradable corkscrew made of engineered wood. Dr. Linning Yao is director of the Morphine Matter Lab in Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science and co-author of that report.

Welcome back to Science Friday, Dr. Yao. Thank you for having you. Listeners can see pictures of this device on our website, but can you describe what this seed wrapper looks like for us. So we designed these three-tailed self-bearing seed carrier. The system is made of three parts. The seed pod at the very bottom, it looks ponte, and also a coiled body, and a long tail. So when rain comes, the coiled body will loosen itself, and that will cause a spinning lotion of the system and eventually have it drill into the ground by itself. And the top, these tails kind of look like a pinwheel on on top of a stick. Exactly, especially if you have the three-tailed version. It really looks like a

pinwheel. And the three-tails are designed for very specific purpose. It helps the seed to establish itself in a specific pose that's easier to initiate the drilling. So this corkscrew shape or this top that kind of looks like a helicopter, it's not the whole story. How do you engineer it to physically burrow into the ground? This is inspired by how the natural seeds, a natural grass species called erodean seed can self-burying to the ground. So in the lab, we basically studied how the natural seed works in this way and figured out a engineering solution to have the self-barial behavior. And we can actually now have our system drill even faster and more effective than the natural competitors per se. So how quickly does it spin into the ground?

It's not very fast. You know, it's a, you know, it's a, you know, passive system, so the wood has to be wettened first by the rain or rise, humidity in the atmosphere, and gradually as the water molecules penetrate in and swell the matrices of the cellulose construct, the coil will start to loosen itself. When you say it responds to moisture, is it like when my hair responds to humidity gets curlier? Is it kind of like that? Both hairs and also the wood materials we use as well as the materials that are used for natural self-bearing seeds are hygromorphic. So this is the term basically means responsive to water molecules in the environment and transform. So the idea is they can attract water and expand a lot of certain direction.

And in our seed, the expansion will cause the loosening of the coil. and the transformation of the whole body and then allow the motion of drilling. Why do you think we need this now? What is the use of these seeds? So we looked into the current practice of aerial delivery of seeds, basically using airplanes or drones to drop seeds from the above. This is already a common practice in agriculture

and also in reforestation, when you have to deploy seas to massive area in a short time period or when those places are hard to reach. But there are obstacles. So when you drop the seeds from the sky, you don't bury them. And then they ended up blown away by strong wind or eaten by the birds. So then we got inspired by how nature sees to conquer those obstacles, right? They drop on the floor, they self-fairy. So we wanted to give out more of a physical replica.

to allow our carrier to basically embody different seeds that are needed for our environmental conservation, for agriculture, but also have improved germination rate compared to the currencies dropped from the sky. Are these seed packages, can they be mass produced? Like, how are they made? So right now, we only have smaller scale manufacturing strategy in the lab. It's basically made of two critical steps. when it's a chemical washing process to make the wood more compliant.

If you think about wood is actually kind of brittle, but in order to turn it into a very large curvature, basically very tight coil, you need it to be a bit more compliant. So that's the chemical washing process. And then next we will follow by a molding process, manually winding the flat wood stripes into the coiled body. It sounds very simple.

Indeed, it's not complicated, But still, there will be some more efforts needed to make it mass-producible in a factory, also cheaply, hopefully. Have you and your grad students gotten very good at this? We are getting definitely very good at it through the years. So we had to basically fabricate more than 200 seeds, each with three tails for our outdoor tests. And through this process, we're getting more and more precise, maintenance. exactly the identical geometries. Have you worked on any other shapes or types of seed wrappers?

Along the idea of self-bearing seeds, we actually explore, for example, different sizes, different numbers of tails, and we're interested in different sizes because we're interesting in using it to carry different things. So for example, bearing a very small vegetable seeds need only a very small carrier to save material, but if you want to use it to deploy whitebark pine seeds for reforestation purpose, then you need much larger body. And we're interested in whitebark pine because that is commonly used for reforestation in North America.

Can you use this for more than just seeds? That's one also a really good question. So obviously, you can chemically wash the wood and load it into other shapes rather than the coil or the tail. and they're going to be moisture responsive, they're going to be biodegradable. So in that sense, you can imagine using this for, yeah, water fluctuation-based energy harvesting in the wild. You're also thinking about making biodegradable robots that response to rain or day and night moisture fluctuations in the environment. Lots of possible use cases that are, yeah, all exciting to us.

I am so excited for these biodegradable robots. I'm a little sad, though, that if they biodegrade. So where do you go from here? Like, what's the next big step beyond solving the mass production problem? We really hope to be able to learn more from domain experts. So we're talking about farmers or ecologists and people who are, you know, right now doing actual jobs for reforestation or environmental conservation. because none of us are really professional in those fields and anything we put into nature are serious. We don't want to accidentally cause more harm. We know that they're good for

germination but not necessarily compatible with the local environment or ecological conditions. So yeah, basically getting more engaged in those conversations with domain experts for possibly larger pilot tests are very exciting to us. Dr. Lining Yao is director of the Morphine Matter Lab in Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science in Pittsburgh. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. It's a great honor to be here. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KER News.

St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. Northern California is home to the Winnomomwintu indigenous people. It's also home to the massive Shasta Dam, which creates power from the Sacramento River. The dam is more than 600 feet tall and supplies water for agriculture and people all over California. And there's a proposal to make this big dam even higher. Now, the relationship between the Winnam and Wintu and the Shasta Dam is complicated. The Winnom and Wintu live along the McLeod River.

It's a tributary of the Sacramento. And this conflict is the basis of a new season of the podcast, The Spiritual Edge. It's from K-A-L-W, Public Radio in San Francisco. Joining me to talk about it is my guest, Judy Silber, who's the lead reporter for The Spiritual Edge. Judy, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me. Well, let's start first with some history about the Winnam-Wintu tribe. What can you tell me about who they are and what is their relationship to this land? Sure. So the Winnom-Wintu are an indigenous people in Northern California. They're a tiny tribe. So they only have about 130 enrolled members. And something

important to know about them is they are not considered to be federally recognized. That is, there's no official relationship with the federal government. What's important here to know about that is that they don't have a reservation and they don't own any land along the McLeod River, which is their homelands. This is the place where their ancestors fished and lived. There's a very strong relationship to place and they're constantly going back there. And that relationship to place is what makes them who they are. So then let's talk about the Shasta Dam. When exactly was it built and just how big is it? Because from pictures, it looks pretty massive. It is really big. Yeah. So Shastodam was built in the late 1930s. Construction started in the 1930s. It was completed in

1945. And it's 602 feet tall. It's actually the eighth largest dam. the entire country, and its reservoir, which is Shasta Reservoir, is the largest in the state of California. So the reservoir, which is kind of the important part because that's the part that holds water, it is 4.5 million acre feet. So that means it can cover an area of 4.5 million acres and then a foot deep of that. So the dam and this reservoir were all built as part of what's called the Central Valley Project, which as someone described it to me was this audacious attempt. to re-engineer California. So, you know, California in the north, you get a lot of rain during the winter in the south.

You get some, but not so much. And the Central Valley project with Shastodiam as a keystone part of that project moved water from north to south and really completely change the geography of the state. And in changing the geography of the state, it changed the lands for the people that we're talking about here for the tribal groups. That's correct. So the Winnem and Wintu, sort of the heart of their homeland is on the McLeod River, which is one of four tributaries that goes into Shastodam. And so when Shastodan was built, all that water is held back. And that meant that their river, more than 20 miles of it, was flooded. And so when it was flooded, you had villages that were lost.

You had sacred sites that were lost. You know, we actually have a clip from Chief Kallin Sisk, who's the Winnamu, hereditary and spiritual leader. And this is what she had to say about what happened when Shastodam was built. We didn't get any land on the McLeod River. We didn't get anything for everything that was taken. We were displaced and homeless, and our people was in the boarding schools and in the service. And when they came home, they had to have a different kind of life.

They've spent the time since then, since the 1940s, recuperating from that loss. And they've been sort of barely hanging on since then. And so this effort to raise Shasta Dam higher, for them, it's both like pouring salt on a wound, but it's also like making the wound bigger because they could lose even more. And when we talk about losing even more, we're talking about something that's very important to them. The salmon, which is such an important part of tribal life, but also such an important part of tribal life,

but also such an important part of the ecology of the region. Right. So when Shastodam went up, the salmon were blocked from being able to swim upstream. So they were blocked from basically their spawning grounds. So the McLeod River was once considered one of the most plentiful spawning grounds in the entire state. Scientists have estimated that within the watershed, the entire watershed that is covered by Shastodam, you had somewhere between a million and two million fish that were more. migrating up river every year. And the McLeod River was a key part of that. And so when Chastodan

went up, they can't get to the McLeod, they're blocked. You have salmon numbers that are plummeting. And they just have kept going down since then. And so salmon have just really suffered because they're not able to access the cold waters that they need to. And then the Winnam Wintu have suffered as well because of that because they don't have this species, which for them, well, they consider it a cultural resource. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm talking with Judy Silber. She's lead reporter for The Spiritual Edge.

Judy, you've talked about this proposal to raise the dam higher. What exactly would the purpose be of raising the dam? The idea behind raising Shasta Dam behind building it higher is to get a little bit more water for these farmers who have actually been suffering. during these drought years that we've had in California.

And so, you know, everyone knows that with climate change, California's droughts are getting longer and more frequent. And so one of the proposals on the table has been, well, to build a bigger reservoir, which would then be able to hold more water, and then that would give more water to the farmers down south. The problem with that is that there are people who question whether Shasta Dam will ever fill again. The consequences for the Winnomu,

two, they're pretty severe. For the Wittima Wintu, it means that more of their sacred sites, even one of the old village sites would be destroyed. They have sacred rocks that would go underwater, rocks that are used for important ceremonies, such as rite of passage ceremonies for their young women. And they basically say, you know, we have sacrificed enough for the state of California. We gave you all this water. You know, it's enough. It's enough. And we're we actually need something back now as opposed to taking more away. Judy, is there a plan to bring the salmon back to this river? There is. There is. So the federal government has been working on a plan since 2010 to bring one species of salmon. It's called the Winter Run Chinook salmon back to the McLeod River.

I don't want to give everything away because you should listen to the podcast. But I will say that this past summer, I was able to attend a ceremony on the McLeod River where eggs from a local hatchery were actually planted into the McLeod River. Those eggs hatched, and then those little tiny salmon, those juvenile salmon, swam downstream, where they were then captured, because of course you have to get them around Shasta Dam. They can't just fall over the dam. So they captured them, and then they brought them to a place below the dam, and then let them be on their way to swim out to the ocean and grow. It was a really moving moment because it was the first time in about 80 years that any salmon had been swimming in the McLeod, so since Shastoddam was built. So that's the federal

government's plan. The Winnem and Winnam and Winnowman Wintersi are on board with that plan, but they also have another idea for bringing salmon back and they're really intent on this idea. And that is to bring wild salmon, basically wild salmon, back to the McLeod. So the other salmon that are now in the river were hatchery salmon. They want to bring wild salmon, and it's a wild story as to where those salmon come from, but I'm not going to spoil the ending on this one. I'll let people listen, and you can find out what I'm talking about. Judy Silber is lead reporter for The Spiritual Edge. The podcast is based at KALW in San Francisco, California. Judy, thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate it, and thank you for this

reporting. Thank you. The podcast, The Spiritual Edge, is airing a prayer for salmon right now. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts and at Spiritual Edge.org. Now, we have to take a quick break. And when we come back, the intersection of artificial intelligence and hip-hop, this is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. And I'm Regina Barber. On Science Friday, we've been following closely the explosion of new artificial intelligence tools available to the public and the ethical implications in using AI within creative mediums. This week, we're focusing on how AI intersects with the most popular music genre in the United States. Hip-hop.

Take a listen to this viral deep fake of Kanye West, rapping a verse from Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Cut down a lens, I know it's state from Real It opinion. I look up to the skies and see I'm just a poor boy, need no sympathy. It was created with just a few clicks using the program Uber Duck, And it turns out that what makes hip hop performers versus so spellbinding is what makes them easier to mimic in deepfakes than other genres of music.

Joining me now to talk more about the role of AI and the future of hip hop is my guest, the rapper and music science and technology scholar, Dr. Anango Lumumba Kasango, also known as Samis. She's an assistant professor of music at Brown University based in Providence, Rhode Island. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Lumumba Cassango. Hi, this is so exciting. Let's talk about that Kanye deep fake. What was your reaction when you first heard it? Oh, I was horrified. I was totally horrified, you know, in part just because of the space that Kanye West occupies culturally right now. But then also, of course, I immediately, my brain started spinning and thinking about what are the implications of this thing? How is this going to change the landscape, soundscape of the art form in which I work and the art form that I've

fallen in love with. Is the ability to create convincing deep fakes unique to hip-hop? I imagine you could also like create a deep fake to say somebody like Taylor Swift or something. Yeah, it's totally possible to create deep fakes in other genres. I mean, as long as you have the kind of sonic data, then you're able to manipulate it and create sort of a pool from which to draw. raw material. The thing that's interesting and troubling about the development within hip hop is that there's so much speech data, there's so much word data, because as folks who are familiar with the form understand, and according to the words of Adam Bradley, who is a scholar and thinker of hip hop poetics, there's more speech data per line in a rap song than there is in a song on another

genre. So other than the like words per line, there's also a rapper's like unique style. So actually, does that make it easier to mimic? That's a really great question. Part of my, my research and interest in this has led me down these interesting wormholes in the world of rap generators. So there are kind of online platforms for folks to quote unquote craft versus. And in some cases, is craft verses in the style of a particular artist. So what that means is for that particular rap generator, the pool of words and phrases are coming directly from a specific artist's catalog. So there's a generator for the rapper MF Doom.

That's amazing and totally nonsensical and very silly to play with, which was developed by Nabil Hassain, who's a technologist. and he developed this tool to generate rhymes that are in the quote-unquote style of MF Doom. So it's like, what does that mean? Well, what that means is that his entire pool of verses has been mined for different rhyme sounds, different combinations of words, and those are the types of bars that are served up to the quote-unquote writer. And we'll get to like how good those generators are. But let's first talk about you'd written a piece for public books that this ability for AI to convincingly impersonate black artists is part of a legacy of white people impersonating black performers.

Can you unpack that a little bit for us? Absolutely. So folks might be familiar with terms like high tech blackface and digital blackface, which have emerged in popular conversations recently and we're coming from the world of critical media studies to talk about the news. sort of tools of the digital age that allow non-black people to adopt black personhood through their avatars and across different platforms. I mean, many folks will be sort of familiar with TikTok and the way that it allows folks to mime particular artists. And it's interesting to think about what circulates, what kinds of clips achieve virality. And so when we talk about digital blackface, the term blackface itself refers to blackface minstrelsy, which is a racist.

theater and musical form that emerged in the early 19th century, and it became America's first national form of entertainment. This practice has been further kind of understood, not just as a space for mockery and discussed, but also a reflection of white fascination with the other, with the risk of entering into that space, becoming. this other group, right? Becoming the other allows for some kind of transcendence or connection with a quote unquote like primal self. These kinds of ideas are what undergirded my understanding of what was happening with tools like UberDuck. What the potential is for tools like this to perpetuate some of these kind of racist practices. Right. And because none of this is new,

this kind of appropriation. How could AI remove accountability for appropriating black artist music? Yeah. So, I mean, I think this can happen in a number of ways. Primarily, I think part of how appropriation in the digital age has functioned is that the distance between creator and appropriator, for lack of a better term, has been widened, right? The gulf between where the material is coming from and the person who's able to co-opt that has has really widened in some ways. And so folks are much less, you know, phrases and ideas will pop up on our feeds, right? And we might have no relationship with where that thing came from. And so in so many cases, we've seen, you know, African-American vernacular English, phrases that are coming specifically

from black folks that then make their way through the kind of ecosystem of the internet. And next thing we know, it's the catchphrase of a brand, right? A brand is utilizing this phrase for monetary gain or a particular artist or influencer who's not at all connected with the space from which this, which these ideas and creations emerge. And so I think with AI specifically, there's the goal for, is sort of further widened because we have this sort of generalizable pool, right? There's a rapper from nowhere, essentially. We're able to create a voice from quote unquote nowhere, especially when the pool from which these words and phrases and ideas is not known to the listener and or writer.

And so that's what really concerns me because, you know, I worry there's no way to account for credit in this system. I want to circle back to talk more about using the AI. Like, remember we said, is it good? You have some firsthand experience in working to develop a rap generator for a video game based on the HBO TV series Insecure. Congratulations. That sounds amazing. Thank you. In the research process, you tried out some of the online lyric generators. What did you find? What were their limitations? What were their benefits? Well, so in terms of the limitations, one of the things that I found was that for the most part, the lyrics are kind of nonsensical. You'll, you know, type in a particular prompt and I picked the word, anything.

And so, yeah, I want to write about anything. So tell me how to do that. So I plug that in. And the verse that came back to me was fairly incoherent as a narrative. But one thing that was interesting as I continued to utilize the, tool is I would see the same kinds of lyrics, language that could be coded as misogynist and or queer antagonistic kind of kept popping up no matter what I was trying to rap about. And so I wondered, you know, is this a reflection of the pool of words and lyrics that the

developers decided to use? Or is this a reflection of the biases of the, the developers to make sure that those kinds of phrases and framings were showing up in every single iteration of any kind of rap verse I wanted to develop, which I think is a problem, reflects a broader problem around how people view and listen to hip hop music more broadly. I know through my own experience as a writer and producer and performer, how vast and incredible and incredibly creative and ingenious emcees can be. And yet in these tools, in the tool that I was using, I was so, I was so limited in the ways that I could speak about the world. It kept referring to, it kept reflecting the sort of like tired ideas about hip hop as as uniquely perverse or

uniquely invested in misogyny or queer antagonism. It just makes me think of that outcast line. You thought hip hop was only guns and alcohol. Yep. Period. You also decided to put some guardrails on what words players could and could not say in the game. How do you go about making those decisions? Yeah. Ooh, that was so complicated.

And I think that's part of it, right? I think that the community aspect of developing a tool is critical to its success and critical to its engagement with the communities for whom the thing ostensibly is supposed to serve, right? Like, I have my ideas about what counts as a dope verse or I have my ideas about what's offensive or what's interesting. But as a group, as a game studio, we would regularly have conversations about particular words, not running away from words that could be perceived as, you know, harmful, but thinking about where the harm is coming from and how to subvert that harm. So, you know, the game allows folks to use the B word, for example. And you can use that word, but only to refer to yourself affirmatively. And so that was a kind of caveat that we

threw into the game process because we didn't want it to be abused or used as a way of demeaning somebody. But there were certain other words that we excised, you know, the N-word. We made sure that that that wasn't accessible because of the, you know, the sort of racial politics of the moment, we didn't have the capacity to figure out an artful way to engage with that, not knowing who was going to be playing the game. I'm Regina Barber, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. You recently also tested chat GBT to see how well it might write some of your verses. Were they any good?

Better than the previous lyric generators you've tested before. So the verses were definitely light years ahead of the other generators that I tried, just in terms of coherence. So I plugged myself in and the verse that's supposedly coming from me says, I don't fit the mold, that's for sure. I'm not just another rapper. I'm something more. I spit fire on the mic like a dragon's roar and I'm not afraid to speak up. That's what I'm here for. Okay.

Yeah. So it's getting at the things that are important for that particular rapper. Like dragons. I love dragons. So that's one. But also this idea of like not fitting the mold that is actually something that I'm invested in as an MC. And it understands what we're about but cannot approach the way that that emerges as a kind of sonic representation or as a written verse.

that the complexity of how that's expressed through, you know, each individual artist is the richness of that is completely cut from the picture. One of the things that ChatGBTGBT isn't really great at is slant rhymes. Can you explain what a slant rhyme is? There are perfect rhymes and there are slant rhymes. So a perfect rhyme is when the rhyme sounds are exactly the same. So like car and bar, right? And a slant rhyme is when the vowel sound is similar or shared, but the actual makeup of the word is not totally the same. So the first few lines of a song I have called 1080P say, I'm kind of scared of the academy. I think that my parents are proud of me. I just wish I knew how to be comfortable here. I never feel like I'm allowed to breathe.

So Academy, proud of me, allowed to breathe. they have similar kind of rhyme sounds and through the magic of rap vocalizing, you can kind of bend them to sound more similar than they would in speech. But that's an example of how slant rhymes emerge in the rap space. For one, I love 1080P. But now let's listen to an example of another good slant rhyme of yours. Here's a bit from your verse on Open Mic Eagles track, hymnal. I'd rather be hiding alone like some Ewarks up in tree tops, creeping,

around like I'm tea boss, steeping the grounds in my teapots, but I'm Steve Jobs on my Apple updating my e-shops, eat an apple a day, take a brief pause. Yeah, your job is not being taken anytime. It's just, it's not. You're amazing. Thank you. Thank you. It was great to listen to that again. We've just run through all the negatives, most of the negatives of AI and its interaction with hip-hop. Do you see any possibility for something good to come out of using AI in hip-hop? Yeah. I mean, so something interesting that came up. when I was using ChatGPT, is I typed in something like write a rhyme

and the style of Jay-Z. And the first thing that popped up was this note, I do not have the ability to rap like Jay-Z or any other artist. However, I can suggest that if you want to learn how to rap like Jay-Z, you might consider studying his music and style, practicing freestyle and writing lyrics,

and working with a vocal coach or other experienced rapper to develop your skills. Remember that becoming a skilled rapper takes time, dedication, and practice. So don't get discouraged if it takes a while to achieve your goals. Good luck. And I thought that was really amazing because one of the things that I feel like all of these rap generators has missed is an understanding of the complexity of the form.

I mean, this is really incredible poetic and sonic work. And the last thing that I think could be interesting is that, you know, there could be a space in which we start building our own kind of libraries and sharing that with folks and having that become a kind of interesting art form. So I'm thinking about the words of Alexis Andre, who works for Sony computer science laboratories. And I was on a panel with him about ethics and aesthetics last year. And he brought up this really provocative idea about the data itself representing a kind of art form or asset. And so it's like, here's the Sammas Library. right? Like here's the library of common phrases and terms and ideas that come up in this artist's work.

And people might be able to develop that for themselves, which I think could be interesting, could be fun and exciting. Dr. Lumumba Casango, Samis, thank you so much for this great conversation. It was wonderful. Thank you. This was awesome. Dr. Anango Lumumba Casango, also known as Samis, is an assistant professor of music at Brown University based in Providence, Rhode Island. Here's Rasha Aireti with some of the folks who helped make this show happen. Our digital producers are D. Peter Schmidt and Emma Gomez. Ariel Zitch is our director of audience.

Sandy Roberts is our education program manager. Annie Nero is our individual giving manager. And I'm Rasha Aridi, radio producer. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Rasha. B.J. Lederman composed our theme music. I'm Regina Barber. And I'm John Dankowski.

Have a great weekend.