What a strange article, from somebody who should understand the underlying technology (click on the “books” tab - the author is a technologist).
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. It’s mixing up all sorts of opinions and trying to put them under one umbrella.
We get it, you like classical music, you don’t like AI, you don’t like what Spotify represents, you don’t like corporations serving mainstream users for profit. All reasonable stances in isolation, but you can’t wrap them up in a pretentious article like this. There probably is a version of this argument that is compelling, but as it stands the text of the article just feels like a collection of category errors.
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?
Basically it's because what "AI" can do is extremely different from what "AI evangelists" claim it can do.
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.
> Basically it's because what "AI" can do is extremely different from what "AI evangelists" claim it can do.
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.
> I haven't seen a single "AI evangelist" address any concerns and limitations
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?
It's easy to address the limitations of AI by simply not using AI for those. No one forces you to use AI for tasks where its capabilities are limited; regardless, there are plenty of tasks where they aren't.
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?
You are strawmanning hard here. Who is "they"? You are putting all "AI evangelists" into the same blob here, and instead of answering the questions at-hand you ignore them and respond in an ad-hominem style by attacking a project that someone else made, completely unrelated to this entire thread. That is not good faith discourse!
So you want to bring every conversation on the topic down to the level of the most idiotic fanboys making the most outlandish claims that are easiest to shoot down?
If this was JUST directly in response to these “AI evangelists”, a group which I’ll ignore that you’re unfairly treating as a monolith, that’d be fine.
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.
Oh, I was not comparing it with out-sourced development and was instead comparing it with developing it oneself.
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.
I suspect the unspoken premise was that it was all in context of people who - just like those who hire contractors - don’t have the capacity to do it themselves.
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)
> This could be true, but why ignore the fact that you create a full blown native Mac app, with a single sentence?
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'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 think what you're describing is what people working with recommender systems call serendipity. Maximizing serendipity, while maintaining relatively high relevance/recommendation success rate, is supposedly a pretty difficult problem to solve. I'm not sure if LLMs have changed that.
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.
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.
> the input data is usually pretty terrible. It's based on either similarity
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.
These are great, thank you so much for sharing the recommendations. I tuned in to NTS and casually just kept on listening for a very long time. If anyone else has good recommendations, I'm all ears. Thank you.
Spotify should have twitch-style, human hosted, radio shows (intentionally no video) with live chat. with full access to the catalog, it would easily bring back communities built around good music.
That would be good experimnent and could actually work.
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.
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.
> 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:
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.
Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you try to shift the blame to the user. All the prompts were crystal clear. Trying to shift any blame on user error is non-sensical stupidity or dumb manipulation in this case.
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.
> Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you try to shift the blame to the user.
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).
> Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you try to shift the blame to the user
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.
> it was a skill issue on the part of the Spotify engineers writing the internal system prompt for their slop DJ
Spotify are currently making a big deal about not writing any code - I attended a webinar this week where one of the slides proudly trumpeted this fact:
“
0 lines of code
Spotify's best engineers have not written a line of code since December.”
Or someone cueing up well-known pop/dance tunes at a wedding/disco. Last time I was at one they weren't generally firing up symphonies, string quartets then doing a deeper drop of a heavy hitting baroque banger to see the bodies hit the floor.
Yes it is. "Classical" without further context means any part of the tradition of Western art music with written score. Classical-era classical music is a subset of classical as a whole.
The Spotify AI DJ makes some pretty cool sets for me, but I listen to Hyperpop and Outrun type electronic music, stuff like that. A DJ spinning sets of classical music is pretty weird haha. I’d recommend just listening to the Classical New Releases playlist, which is excellent.
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.
Pandora is the only one that even remotely came close to something worthwhile, for me. It usually picked stuff that I wanted to hear; and that was a decade ago. Every other selection service regularly fed me garbage.
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.
What would you add to MP3 tags? ID3v2 already has separate fields for section/title/performer/conductor/composer/lyricist, it isn't the spec's fault Spotify doesn't use them.
I listen to a lot of old music - 1950s, 1960s. I don't really have peers who listen to it so discoverability is a real issue. Pandora was amazing for me ~20 years ago, it introduced me to songs I never would have heard. Especially in the 50s you had a lot of "one hit wonders" so just listening to a band wasn't a great way to find other songs that I would like.
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.
My observations are that the average person is bothered by the slop of modern playlists full of AI music, but they don’t care enough to do anything about it.
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.
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.
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.
As a Spotify user, I often wonder how much they're constrained in their choices by their contracts with music publishers. As an example, the fact that you don't have an option to downvote a song - ie, signaling that you don't want to hear it - is such a feature gap that I can't believe it's there by choice.
I wouldn't be surprised if creating a truly great AI DJ was also hindered by this kind of legal shackles.
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 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.
As of a few months ago I get AI slop tracks in virtually all YTM automatic playlists, after a few normal tracks, so I abandoned the platform entirely.
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".
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The classical classification system is equivalent to the classification of cover versions in popular music. Of course, most audio software handles cover versions poorly too, but it's not like it's a completely unknown problem.
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.
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.
Ha, despite all that the author exposes themselves as a filthy casual anyway by focusing on the work itself, as if Spotify were looking up a score. Instead “of course” we are looking for a recording, principally keyed by, for example, conductor (orchestra), director of music (choral), and/or a soloist or key ensemble members. Searching by work is like typing in “Hallelujah” to find a version by someone other than Leonard Cohen.
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.
>the author exposes themselves as a filthy casual anyway by focusing on the work itself, as if Spotify were looking up a score
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.
I haven't listened to radio for over a decade, but back when I did I listened to BBC Radio 3, where the DJ played classical. "DJ" does not necessarily mean somebody beatmixing dance music in a club. Spotify's "AI DJ" is obviously meant to simulate a radio DJ.
> [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.
"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."
What a strange article, from somebody who should understand the underlying technology (click on the “books” tab - the author is a technologist).
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. It’s mixing up all sorts of opinions and trying to put them under one umbrella.
We get it, you like classical music, you don’t like AI, you don’t like what Spotify represents, you don’t like corporations serving mainstream users for profit. All reasonable stances in isolation, but you can’t wrap them up in a pretentious article like this. There probably is a version of this argument that is compelling, but as it stands the text of the article just feels like a collection of category errors.
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?
Basically it's because what "AI" can do is extremely different from what "AI evangelists" claim it can do.
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.
> Basically it's because what "AI" can do is extremely different from what "AI evangelists" claim it can do.
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.
> I haven't seen a single "AI evangelist" address any concerns and limitations
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?
It's easy to address the limitations of AI by simply not using AI for those. No one forces you to use AI for tasks where its capabilities are limited; regardless, there are plenty of tasks where they aren't.
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.
You are strawmanning hard here. Who is "they"? You are putting all "AI evangelists" into the same blob here, and instead of answering the questions at-hand you ignore them and respond in an ad-hominem style by attacking a project that someone else made, completely unrelated to this entire thread. That is not good faith discourse!So you want to bring every conversation on the topic down to the level of the most idiotic fanboys making the most outlandish claims that are easiest to shoot down? If this was JUST directly in response to these “AI evangelists”, a group which I’ll ignore that you’re unfairly treating as a monolith, that’d be fine.
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.
>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...
> 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.
Oh, I was not comparing it with out-sourced development and was instead comparing it with developing it oneself.
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.
I suspect the unspoken premise was that it was all in context of people who - just like those who hire contractors - don’t have the capacity to do it themselves.
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)
> This could be true, but why ignore the fact that you create a full blown native Mac app, with a single sentence?
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'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 think what you're describing is what people working with recommender systems call serendipity. Maximizing serendipity, while maintaining relatively high relevance/recommendation success rate, is supposedly a pretty difficult problem to solve. I'm not sure if LLMs have changed that.
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.
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.
> the input data is usually pretty terrible. It's based on either similarity
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.
I rather do my own mix tapes, or mix MP3, taken from CDs that I still buy, occasionally directly from bands after concert.
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.
These are great, thank you so much for sharing the recommendations. I tuned in to NTS and casually just kept on listening for a very long time. If anyone else has good recommendations, I'm all ears. Thank you.
NTS is truly excellent yes.
The streaming app algorithms are bland as hell, built for people who just want noise in the background.
NTS and Radio6, genuinely enough to expose me to new things
Which weirdly enough has made Soundcloud one of my primary sources for finding music I enjoy, via DJ sets.
Spotify should have twitch-style, human hosted, radio shows (intentionally no video) with live chat. with full access to the catalog, it would easily bring back communities built around good music.
That would be good experimnent and could actually work.
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.
Nice idea! Let’s hope that some other platform executes this (let’s be honest, Spotify doesn’t care about humans in any way).
tiny desk
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.
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.
> maybe the prompt says 'return one song based on the suggestion, and then songs from similar artists after'
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.
Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you try to shift the blame to the user. All the prompts were crystal clear. Trying to shift any blame on user error is non-sensical stupidity or dumb manipulation in this case.
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.
> Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you try to shift the blame to the user.
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).
> Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you try to shift the blame to the user
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.
"Disgusting" is a strong term to use regarding a poor quality music chooser
Pretty sure they were saying it was a skill issue on the part of the Spotify engineers writing the internal system prompt for their slop DJ.
> it was a skill issue on the part of the Spotify engineers writing the internal system prompt for their slop DJ
Spotify are currently making a big deal about not writing any code - I attended a webinar this week where one of the slides proudly trumpeted this fact:
“ 0 lines of code
Spotify's best engineers have not written a line of code since December.”
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.
Or someone cueing up well-known pop/dance tunes at a wedding/disco. Last time I was at one they weren't generally firing up symphonies, string quartets then doing a deeper drop of a heavy hitting baroque banger to see the bodies hit the floor.
Yeah, that's where he lost me too. Strikes me as very pretentious.
He didn't even say "classical", he was circumspect with "that moste illustriouse of musical traditionnes".
Because most of that list isn't classical music
Yes it is. "Classical" without further context means any part of the tradition of Western art music with written score. Classical-era classical music is a subset of classical as a whole.
Well, Charles would just say that you are one of the ones that dgaf
The entire thing is written in a curmudgeonly fashion, led by that massive list of musicians.
We get it, you like classical music and Spotify is a poor fit. That's... the article?
Glad I wasn't the only one. Love how he goes on to say how he's aware that people are unfamiliar with all those names he just dropped.
The Spotify AI DJ makes some pretty cool sets for me, but I listen to Hyperpop and Outrun type electronic music, stuff like that. A DJ spinning sets of classical music is pretty weird haha. I’d recommend just listening to the Classical New Releases playlist, which is excellent.
"wanky"
Austraian/New Zealander detected lol
Englishman. Where do you think the antipodeans got it from.
Specifically one who disliked The Hard Road: Restrung and Metal in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hard_Road:_Restrung
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.
Pandora is the only one that even remotely came close to something worthwhile, for me. It usually picked stuff that I wanted to hear; and that was a decade ago. Every other selection service regularly fed me garbage.
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.
What would you add to MP3 tags? ID3v2 already has separate fields for section/title/performer/conductor/composer/lyricist, it isn't the spec's fault Spotify doesn't use them.
I listen to a lot of old music - 1950s, 1960s. I don't really have peers who listen to it so discoverability is a real issue. Pandora was amazing for me ~20 years ago, it introduced me to songs I never would have heard. Especially in the 50s you had a lot of "one hit wonders" so just listening to a band wasn't a great way to find other songs that I would like.
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.
The old stuff is the good stuff alright,
(1930s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHLbaOLWjpc
(1950s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6isIPytpk40
(1960s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qssa6ec7faQ
That New Order cover is tight, thank you for this.
> 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.
You do realize Pandora is still there, right?
My observations are that the average person is bothered by the slop of modern playlists full of AI music, but they don’t care enough to do anything about it.
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.
I've found a lot of great music through Pandora.
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.
This is really going to be a problem for the large overlap of people wanting to use Spotify AI features and people who like classical music...
Perhaps file a ticket for the devs and go back to listening to the albums without AI
> 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 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.
As a Spotify user, I often wonder how much they're constrained in their choices by their contracts with music publishers. As an example, the fact that you don't have an option to downvote a song - ie, signaling that you don't want to hear it - is such a feature gap that I can't believe it's there by choice.
I wouldn't be surprised if creating a truly great AI DJ was also hindered by this kind of legal shackles.
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.
Is hammer appallingly stupid for being bad at driving screws, or is the person trying to hammer screws stupid?
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.
Youtube music hasn't failed me and their "beyond the beat" AI DJ/Music bits feature has been really solid.
As of a few months ago I get AI slop tracks in virtually all YTM automatic playlists, after a few normal tracks, so I abandoned the platform entirely.
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".
They should create a benchmark and compare AI against the best possible DJing state of the art: Mexican wedding DJs :)
> 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.
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.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@AshishXiangyiKumar
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/@smalin
> 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.
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.
The classical classification system is equivalent to the classification of cover versions in popular music. Of course, most audio software handles cover versions poorly too, but it's not like it's a completely unknown problem.
Dunno about classical, but Pandora (still) works pretty well for mainstream music.
> 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?
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.
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.
Ha, despite all that the author exposes themselves as a filthy casual anyway by focusing on the work itself, as if Spotify were looking up a score. Instead “of course” we are looking for a recording, principally keyed by, for example, conductor (orchestra), director of music (choral), and/or a soloist or key ensemble members. Searching by work is like typing in “Hallelujah” to find a version by someone other than Leonard Cohen.
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.
>the author exposes themselves as a filthy casual anyway by focusing on the work itself, as if Spotify were looking up a score
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.
When was the last time you heard of a DJ doing classical?
I haven't listened to radio for over a decade, but back when I did I listened to BBC Radio 3, where the DJ played classical. "DJ" does not necessarily mean somebody beatmixing dance music in a club. Spotify's "AI DJ" is obviously meant to simulate a radio DJ.
I hate this AI slop commenting fad.
The em dashes are the only thing making it look AI-written. I think it was human written by someone who likes em dashes.
Ugh, couldn’t read it, could the guy be less smug about liking classical music
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.
More like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.
Now please try again with music that's actually played by DJ's.
Radio DJ isn't the same as club DJ.
"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
Agreed. Besides, the "AI DJ" dude is an African American male with no way to change voice or personality. Virtue signalling at its finest.