Snobbery sniping aside, I empathize with their sentiment, and their work was worth reading. Spotify’s whole UI is far too complicated and I wish they would go the Facebook route of breaking out the separate products into separate apps. Jumbling podcasts, pop music, and covers — sorry, classical music — is a bit weird.
Isn't it the job of a DJ to pick a good recording? Petzold's test seems reasonable to me. As a classical listener, if I want a specific recording I'll just play that recording. The main function of the DJ is music discovery. Perhaps they know of good recordings I haven't already heard.
> 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.
Also, might I recommend looking at the way the world is, not the way the world might be. This is one of the ugly AI tendrils this disgusting industry is putting into everything, bringing ruin to the world. This is the actual reality of it, making the world a dumber, less interesting more stupid place.
“ 0 lines of code
Spotify's best engineers have not written a line of code since December.”
Users are often to blame in many varied cases and there should be no taboo around discussing this. I think maybe some people hear that you should never blame rape victims for rape and then go running wild trying to apply that as a general principle of never blaming anybody who is in any way a victim of anything, even when the "victimhood" is simply some piece of trivial software not working well. But we're not talking about rape so your intense rejection ("disgusting") is completely off the mark.
I'm shifting 'blame' to Spotify, rather than the user or the AI model - although blame is probably a pretty strong word anyway for what is probably just supposed to be a fun DJ feature.
> All the prompts were crystal clear.
We don't know what the prompt is, because the FULL prompt will be a combination of the base prompt plus the user prompt. It's trivial to show that a modern model with a minimal base prompt will return correctly (as per my original post), so IMO there is probably something in the base prompt which is encouraging the model to return differently.
I wanted to clarify the first two points, but i'll not respond to the rest of your comment as it's a bit overly-emotive (calling what I say disgusting, rambling about the downfall of society as a whole etc).
What are the chances there is or will be a prompt to direct listeners from artists with higher royalties to those with basic fees?
If I was an MBA, this would absolutely a direction I would take.
Classical is a harder (or at least different) problem and it's why specialist apps like Apple Music Classical exist.
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.
you have to do your own search and play, but some of the stuff by unknowns and famous artists giving back is profound, they KNOW when they hit it, all live, mostly acoustic and all useing musicians, no tape, no sequencers. listen to one such performance, and maybe you dont need anything else for a week.
The streaming app algorithms are bland as hell, built for people who just want noise in the background.
I would love to try it however they would have to solve "global song availability" and "Sponsored songs only Stations".
But if they did try there is the chance of some niche communities forming.
It wouldn't even need to be live to begin with. A narrated playlist with a DJ and basic control functionality such as fading into songs or a voice over.
Not trivial but doable and I wonder why they never tried that.
The significant problem that AI faces in automatically curating something is that the input data is usually pretty terrible. It's based on either similarity of the thing being curated which doesn't work because people don't want things to be too similar or to dissimilar, or it's randomness which doesn't work because it's too discordant, or it's based on patterns in the data (people who listened to X listened to Y, so recommend Y to people who listen to X) which works but only if the listener's taste aligns with the majority. If you introduce multiple sources of patterns in the data you quickly lose any variation and things stop being interesting.
This is a hard problem. No one has ever really solved it, despite Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, etc investing hundreds of millions into the space. Humans are probably just too fickle to accept that an algorithm can choose for us. It lacks the social proof that a tastemaker like a DJ brings.
I found luck just using a LLM to chat about my tastes, what I like, what kinds of songs I want to discover ... it does a good job and is able to also give me background.
Otherwise a few European radios, even if with ads, as a second goal is to keep my foreign language skills up to date.
Also a few lucky algorithm gems on YouTube, or the KEXP, Tiny Desk, ARTE Concerts, Colours channels.
Never got into Spotify.
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.
Personally I dropped playlists long ago for YouTube dj sets which are a million times better than Spotify’s AI dj. Some of this is not a tech failing but the DJs have access to unreleased tracks, their own private edits, and are more willing to do more bold things. The AI DJ will never drop a surprise change that makes the crowd scream.
Pandora was worthless, though, because of their skip limit (even in the paid version). Even with its effectiveness, it would still feed me junk.
This guy is a classical music guy, though, and all the pickers suck, for that. Classical has been treated badly, forever. I am extremely disappointed that Apple segregated classical into its own app, because I have always enjoyed mixing it in with my regular music.
One thing about classical music, is that every performance is a “cover.” Who performs the piece is just as important as who wrote it. None of the selection services seem to understand that.
MP3 tags are pretty much worthless. They are incredibly limited, and I don’t know why they have never been improved.
I don't really use Spotify so I can't compare but Pandora was awesome. I've found Youtube playlists to be the best replacement so far.
(1930s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHLbaOLWjpc
You do realize Pandora is still there, right?
It's very miss-or-miss; you need to be willing to thumb down 95% of what Pandora thinks you'll like. But with enough care, it's a good discovery channel.
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.
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?
The example you described, no.
It is not good because its quality and adherence to the spec (the single sentence) is and will always be probabilistic...
Isn’t the same true for a lot of individual programmers and even teams?
Especially so if they were provided just a short one-sentence vision instead of proper documentation.
Sure, outsourcing is similar, but the difference is one uses a process that is inherently probabilistic and will show up in every result, while other just depends on the probability of you getting a good team.
In this context I suspect a SotA LLM could sometimes beat some cost-comparable UpWork professionals in both quality and spec adherence. In other words, if you need an app and can’t do it yourself and have a tight budget, LLMs are quickly becoming a viable option for more and more complex apps (still only simple ones before it produces junk, but progress is pretty appalling)
I would guess it's for the same reasons that you're ignoring all the fixes necessary to get to an actual "full blown native Mac app". It's rarely a single sentence unless your app does something trivial like printing Hello World.
I haven't seen a single "AI evangelist" address any concerns and limitations, other by than "throw more AI at it" or "it will get better in 5 years, just in time for cold fusion".
> you create a full blown native Mac app, with a single sentence
Like they created a full blown C compiler that "could compile linux" but in reality didn't pass its own tests?
If you constantly cry wolf, no one's going to believe you when the wolf actually comes.
AI is very good at some things and very bad at others. Early on, many thought chess would be one of the last things mastered by computers, but they were wrong. It makes no sense to take the statement "AI is extremely bad at this task compared to humans" and conclude that AI must be useless or a waste of time.
In this case, the AI DJ is bad at picking out classical music. Okay, sure, whatever. But that doesn't automatically mean the AI DJ is bad at everything.
> Like they created a full blown C compiler that "could compile linux" but in reality didn't pass its own tests?
However, every post here that says the slightest thing positive about AI’s abilities is always met with “yeah well it can’t do my dishes for me so it’s total garbage!” BS.
You yourself are bringing up “making a compiler” out of nowhere. Nobody but you brought that up here. Yet you’re using it as the be-all end-all yard stick, simultaneously completely ignoring and completely proving the argument that you’re replying to.
It’s amazing how big a % of the developer community has started acting like intentionally unintelligent petulant children the moment they’re faced with an iota of the sort of job security risk they’ve been inflicting on others for decades. Some of you need to grow up.
You see what you choose to focus on. I come across many people who are excited about the possibilities of AI-assisted coding, who are frustrated by its limitations, who share strategies for overcoming or avoiding those limitations, and s on. For a concrete and famous example, I would put Andrej Karpathy in this category. Where are you looking that you're not finding any of these people? linkedin?
You always have people at both sides of the aisle though - people who say it can do much more than it can, and people who say it can do much less.
It's the same with all technologies - robotics, crypto, drug discovery, the internet, digital cameras, quantum computing, 3D Television, self-driving cars - it was probably the same with the steam engine. All of these will have had people who said that the technology would be useless and die (e.g. Napoleon and the steam engine), and others that would have said it was totally transformative.
Pointing to people who hold extreme opinions either for or against a particular technology, and then dismissing the technology on that basis, isn't particularly useful.
Call me when Spotify and YT collaborate with Deezer on labelling AI music as such. Yes, it's a nuanced concept, but the soup YT was serving me was extremely obvious, which was easily confirmed by checking the throughput of the "artists".
pompous prick
> 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.
Why do people who hate AI think that every use of the term AI is referring to the exact same software program?
> [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.
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.
There are apps specifically dedicated to classical music and there are many youtube channels for classical music, with sheet music[1], with visualizations[2], with videos of concerts.
Spotify and it's drop-in competitors were never good for classical music. This article is just another rant on this issue, by someone to whom classical music is so important, a pillar of western civilization, but not important enough to look for other ways to listen.
Perhaps file a ticket for the devs and go back to listening to the albums without AI
The way things are going I'm not sure how much longer we will have that option.
I wouldn't be surprised if creating a truly great AI DJ was also hindered by this kind of legal shackles.
This is a product issue. This feature was not designed for this use case.
AI is not one thing. LLMs are different from preference engines are different from the models that generate musical compositions are different from image generators. They use some of the same concepts, but as of today, AI is not some all encompassing black box that can do everything.
It’s weird to generalise “This beta spotify feature doesn’t serve me, hence AI is useless”.
Honestly the whole post and tone are just baffling.
walthamstow•1h ago
The term DJ is synonymous with modern, electronic music, anyway.
stavros•1h ago
He didn't even say "classical", he was circumspect with "that moste illustriouse of musical traditionnes".
sambapa•1h ago
mrob•58m ago
sambapa•51m ago
cheeze•46m ago
We get it, you like classical music and Spotify is a poor fit. That's... the article?
BrissyCoder•1h ago
Austraian/New Zealander detected lol
defrost•1h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hard_Road:_Restrung
walthamstow•13m ago
Mistletoe•1h ago
barbs•21m ago
moonbucket•1m ago