The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ

walthamstow

I didn't get past the wanky declaration that he listens to classical, listing out dozens of composers. The term DJ is synonymous with modern, electronic music, anyway.

xav0989

While I sympathize with the issue and have experienced similar problems with classical music, I found the listing of composers and the holier-than-thou attitude (because “pop is bad”) grating and soured the rest of the post.

Closi

From the article: > Am I naïve in expecting Artificial Intelligence to be smart? Is my interpretation of the word “intelligence” too literal? And when an AI behaves stupidly, who’s to blame? The programmers or the AI entity itself? Is it even proper to make a distinction between the two? Or does the AI work in so mysterious a way that the programmers need no longer take responsibility? IMO this is a programming/prompting failure - not a failure in the general capability of 'AI'. We can prove that an AI can understand this with a basic prompt: https://chatgpt.com/share/69b67906-0e18-8012-9123-718fc6422c... This is a minimal base prompt, with no fine-tuning, with the same user prompt, which shows that an AI will respond correctly by default. Presumably either the AI they are using is a weak model, or their prompt is encouraging the model against this (e.g. maybe the prompt says 'return one song based on the suggestion, and then songs from similar artists after') > I’ve heard people claim that an AI can compose music. But how can that be when it can’t even grasp basic concepts in music? Trying to infer the underlying capability of AI to generate music based on a badly-prompted Spotify DJ feature is always going to have it's limits. The proof of 'can AI compose music' will be in the eating of the pudding. AI models have already been able to compose classical music to some extent, and can grasp music theory, so after this point it's just going to be a matter of quality/taste.

wzdd

He doesn't really even dig into the quality of Spotify's AI DJ apart from pointing out, in a very roundabout way, that it was designed for popular music. Classical is a harder (or at least different) problem and it's why specialist apps like Apple Music Classical exist.

comrade1234

I've tried using Spotify and similar services that try to track your preferences but they're just, I don't know, boring. I much prefer the challenge of a human-picked DJ set. I usually listen to dublab (los Angeles, cologne, and Barcelona) and nts1 (usually London) and nts2 (location rotates). They have 1 or 2 hour DJ sessions (live or recorded) and your hear some music that you normally wouldn't be exposed to and sometimes you hate it but usually not.

jonathanlydall

I briefly tried it when they first launched it, but in less than an hour decided I hated it. Which I really should have anticipated since I generally dislike music radio "DJ"s too and Spotify's AI DJ is trying to be like one. In particular it would do things like start playing tracks with no bearing on anything I'd ever listened to, like local South African music which is very far from universally preferred here. I also got the feeling it was pushing "promoted" tracks with little regard to what I would likely like, just like real life radio stations. I also don't care to have some voice interrupting the music all the time. I was hoping it would kind of be like their other "radio"s, but it would be more explorative to finding more "similar" tracks to what I have listened to, without seeming to get stuck in a repeating play list. I suppose it's a cool gimmick for people who are prefer the broadcast radio experience.

spiderfarmer

Now please try again with music that's actually played by DJ's.

mikkupikku

I do wonder how people can be satisfied with automatic music playlists. I was entertained by this for maybe a few hours when Pandora was new, but they all seemingly always devolve into either playing weird shit, playing the same 50 songs over and over again, or playing whatever new release shilled crap the record companies are paying to promote. Yet it seems like everybody else these days is a Spotify addict. I guess most people are fine with it.

lordnacho

But he already explains why it won't work at the beginning. If stuff is cataloged according to a pop paradigm, why would we expect to be able to reassemble it according to a classical one? Presumably a pop DJ would also mess this up. It's like going to an Indian restaurant and asking what Dim Sum they recommend. The only reason a human would be able to do this task is that they might be trained in how to find classical music, and they have spent some time learning what is what in that world. But a Spotify AI is of course going to be trained on the prevailing classification system only.

asah

Dunno about classical, but Pandora (still) works pretty well for mainstream music.

Lucasoato

They should create a benchmark and compare AI against the best possible DJing state of the art: Mexican wedding DJs :)

shubhamjain

I haven't tried AI DJ, so I can't comment on that, but I find it hard to empathize with the author. Not because the criticism lacks merits, but because there is no real attempt to explore the pro/cons of the tech. I see this pattern often with people who complain about AI. They pick a narrow case where it isn't good at and use it to dismiss the whole thing. AI isn't a human, it's going to have its limits. Same thing I saw in AI-assisted coding. People complaining how AI- enabled some XYZ security risk, it's bad, it's crap. This could be true, but why ignore the fact that you create a full blown native Mac app, with a single sentence? That should be good for at least a few things. Right?

oogabooga13

Youtube music hasn't failed me and their "beyond the beat" AI DJ/Music bits feature has been really solid.

igravious

"I should mention that my perspective might be a little different from most people’s because I don’t listen to pop songs. I prefer music of the 500-year tradition that encompasses (in roughly chronological order) composers such as Tallis, Byrd, Dowland, Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Lully, Blow, Corelli, Purcell, Vivaldi, Rameau, Handel, Bach, Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Schubert, Berlioz, Mendelssohn (Fanny and Felix), Schumann (Robert and Clara), Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Verdi, Brahms, Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Strauss, Beach, Schoenberg, Ives, Ravel, Stravinsky, Berg, Price, Copland, Shostakovich, Carter, Boulez, Gubaidulina, Pärt, Reich, Glass, Eastman, León, Adams, Saariaho, J. L. Adams, Wolfe, Higdon, Adès, Thorvaldsdottir, Mazzoli, Shaw, Fisher, and many others." pompous prick

titanomachy

> I don't listen to pop songs. I prefer music of the 500-year tradition that encompasses [list of like 50 composers]... one of the sturdiest pillars of what we call "western civilization" > The use of the word “song” for instrumental music — that is, music that is not sung and hence is not a song — is borderline illiterate. This guy comes across as incredibly obnoxious. It's shit like this that gives classical music a bad rap as stuffy and unapproachable. But yes, Spotify and the like are terrible for classical music. Apple Music has a separate app for this, which does a pretty good job and addresses most of these complaints.

bob1029

I asked this thing to play me some instrumental EDM tracks and it couldn't handle the task. I don't think classical music is even remotely viable. Spotify already really sucks at it. Pouring AI on top definitely won't help the main issue which is gaping holes in relevant content. It just doesn't exist on the platform in most cases.

secretsatan

Ugh, couldn’t read it, could the guy be less smug about liking classical music

sneak

> I’ve heard people claim that an AI can compose music. But how can that be when it can’t even grasp basic concepts in music? Why do people who hate AI think that every use of the term AI is referring to the exact same software program?

xvector

Author seriously needs to touch grass. > [list of 20 classical artists] I’m aware that many people are unfamiliar with this musical tradition, but it forms one of the sturdiest pillars of what we casually refer to as “western civilization.” > Unfortunately, this tradition is not much respected > The use of the word “song” for instrumental music — that is, music that is not sung and hence is not a song — is borderline illiterate. This writeup is insufferably pretentious. It almost reads like a caricature of someone that listens to classical. Prompted playlists is a beta feature designed to cater to most users. They are likely using a heavily quantized model, fine tuned on common use cases. Is it really surprising that it doesn't cater to the fringes of Spotify's user base from the get-go? Clearly the author believes that their taste in music is the superior one, and so Spotify not designing their product experience around their tastes is "appalling." Then you get absurd rants like this: > I’ve heard people claim that an AI can compose music. But how can that be when it can’t even grasp basic concepts in music? Almost like these are two completely separate models, in two completely separate products.

sneak

Spotify is filled with payola, and their claims about it are intentionally extremely misleading while not explicitly fraudulent. It shows up in all Spotify-generated playlists, so I refuse to listen to them. I assume their shitty AI recommendations are similarly filled with cancer.