The article isn’t about the DJ feature at all, despite claiming to be. It is very clearly and openly about Spotify not catering to classical music in general. It starts by calling all people who listen to anything other than classical music “illiterate”!
The Spotify DJ feature is terrible, I agree. That doesn’t mean I find the linked article compelling.
What a baffling take.
There is no confusion as to which “AI” the OP is referring to.
The author wrote:
> Or does the AI work in so mysterious a way that the programmers need no longer take responsibility?
They are pondering, in general, if the non deterministic nature of AI is an excuse for bad products.
The Spotify DJ is a recommendation engine.
Its bad.
Its a lazy, bad implementation that relies on AI, instead of deterministic algorithms; eg. identify requested music and play it.
Instead it wants to “try something different”.
If you press play on the music player on your phone, do you expect it to “try something different?”
…or, is AI making developers and product managers lazy?
It is not a complicated take, and the example is, to me, pretty compelling.
I guess I’m just separating out the fact that I agree with the OP from my criticism of the way the argument was presented.
There’s a reason there’s no deterministic recommendation engines. How would that even work?
Doing something previously impossible isn’t “lazy”.
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> The Spotify DJ is a recommendation engine.
Is it?
Having recently tried Spotify's presumably related "prompt based playlists" feature, I've been wondering:
Is the "AI DJ" maybe not a recommendation engine, but rather an LLM prompted to be a recommendation engine?
>If you press play on the music player on your phone, do you expect it to “try something different?”
I expect it to make a playlist containing the opposite of my taste, like I asked! :)
(YMMV on how good it is at this)
Whoa. Poor form. You give no evidence of either claim in your last sentence.
It has Geminis verve the "baffling" was the hint.
I am human, sorry
Baffling is a common word in Britain and the first term that sprung to mind when reading the article
The article isn’t about the DJ feature at all, despite claiming to be. It is very clearly and openly about Spotify not catering to classical music in general. It starts by calling all people who listen to anything other than classical music “illiterate”!
>It starts by calling all people who listen to anything other than classical music “illiterate”!
It does not. The only reference to literacy is the following:
"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."
That is entirely reasonable and correct.