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Comment by technothrasher | Hacker News Reader

> For example, when the author says “if it can’t do this, how could it compose music?”, that’s a category error.

That isn't really a category error. It's more begging the question. It makes the assumption that the ability to DJ music is the same ability as being able to compose music, and uses that assumption to suggest the conclusion that a failure to DJ classical movement would necessarily result in the failure to compose same. A category error would be assigning a property to AI that it cannot have. It would look more like, "if AI can't DJ music, we have no way to know what color it is."

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Also, a DJ isn’t typically tasked with playing an entire symphony (or pop album, for that matter) on request from start to finish. I’m sure there are a handful of DJs in niche situations who do this at listening bars and on the radio, but it seems pretty rare.

Honestly a human DJ might well do what the Spotify DJ does — play a popular piece that matches the outlandish request and then transition to other music.

To torture the metaphor further - it's also a personal dj, with an audience and customer of 1. Somewhat by definition there can be no outlandish requests, certainly not "play this entire piece".

If I told the DJ at my wedding to play an album front to back, and they transitioned to Aerosmith, I'd be tapping a friend to run the music the rest of the night.

I’m fairly certain Spotify’s core meta data adheres to the US music industry largely set / reinforby Nielsen. I’m curious why the author would want to happen with the feature if not move from 1 artist to another

For chart reporting? Am unfamiliar with the Nielsen standard, but given the state of musical metadata more broadly it's probably not very sophisticated.

Would expect any provider like Spotify to just export the reports Nielsen requires, not design their core systems around it.

> It makes the assumption that the ability to DJ music is the same ability as being able to compose music

And yet an awful lot of musicians are also DJs. It's almost like spending a lot of time playing music and watching how people react to it give you a good sense of how the underlying processes of creating it can work.

GP was obviously talking about AI's abilities, not people's.

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