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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.
Doing something previously impossible isn’t “lazy”.
The system is clearly resolving the users query.
Mixing that with the deterministic “play the songs requested instead of random crap” or even “play related classical music instead of random crap” is clearly not an impossibility.
It actually almost did the right thing. …but no, rather than handling the difficult edges cases like this, just do whatever for edges cases.
It is lazy.
Handling complex difficult edge cases is what differentiates good products from lazy ones.
Re:”play related music”, yeah clearly Spotify isn’t built for classical music. Maybe it should be — I certainly would vote for it to be a priority for a state-operated alternative! But calling a specific feature lazy because of a high-level corporate priority concerning content isn’t valid, IMHO.
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?
I expect it to make a playlist containing the opposite of my taste, like I asked! :)
(YMMV on how good it is at this)
Baffling is a common word in Britain and the first term that sprung to mind when reading the article
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.