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.

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.

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 of course be in the eating of the pudding. I mean of course AI models have already been able to compose classical music to some extent, and can already grasp music theory, so after this point it's just going to be a matter of taste.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.