alt Hacker NewsWhat a strange article, from somebody who should understand the underlying technology (click on the “books” tab - the author is a technologist).
This is not about AI, the author is mostly just pointing out that Spotify was not designed for classical music.
This is a product issue. Spotify DJ is essentially “shuffle with some voice interludes”. There’s probably some non-AI code in there to explicitly prevent it from playing an album end to end.
Besides, AI is not one thing. It’s weird to generalise “This beta spotify feature doesn’t serve me, hence AI is useless”. For example, when the author says “if it can’t do this, how could it compose music?”, that’s a category error.
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, and about 50% of the text is just name dropping specific classical pieces.
I happen to agree that the Spotify DJ feature is terrible, but I think this is a very ineffective way of presenting the argument.
Replies
> For example, when the author says “if it can’t do this, how could it compose music?”, that’s a category error.
Given the author's background I believe it's intentional ragebait. It's as ridiculous as saying LLM can't count the number of Rs so it cannot generate grammatically correct sentences. No way he really thinks the logic is sound.
> 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."
I think quite the opposite for precisely the reason you're saying?
Which is to say, he's doing a very good job of reminding you/us nerds that "there should be no excuse for this, technical or otherwise." The technology exists to make this work very well and has for sometime; I GET why it's not working now, but that doesn't make it any less garbage.
Who would even DJ on classical music?
If you have the slightest knowledge of classical music you would know it should not be mixed like in a dj set, and you would not optimize your dj algorithm for it.
Totally agree. And also, this limitation of Spotify probably affects 0.00000001% of their users. In other words, it just doesn't matter (except to those 3 people)
Every modern streaming platform seems to be focused on the relationship between contemporary singles - who featured on what, what's trending, if you like this current pop artist you'll like this other one. Setting aside OP's interest in classical music this approach doesn't even work for popular music from the 60s to 90s when the primary format was the album. God help you if you try to use voice commands to play Help! (the album by the Beatles) and instead get Help! (the title track by the Beatles).
Perhaps not so strange in that from a practical standpoint many "AI problems" are actually "Data Problems" when you start peeling things back.
Mr Petzold's book, Code, is marvel and you should read it btw
> There’s probably some non-AI code in there to explicitly prevent it from playing an album end to end.
Google’s Nest speakers have or had similar issues: they’d start any requested piece of (at least multi-movement) classical music somewhere in the middle and simply defy any instructions to start at the beginning, bizarre behaviour for a smart speaker.
Seems pretty harsh for somethign it may not have been designed to be good at.
Maybe Spotify works more off lyrics, and classical music usually doesn't have lyrics.
I'd love to have AI that could hear music.
The problem with this article is there are more than one way to be a DJ
>This is a product issue. Spotify DJ is essentially “shuffle with some voice interludes”. There’s probably some non-AI code in there to explicitly prevent it from playing an album end to end.
And I would argue that is one of the stupidest ways.
https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-complete-playlist-e8eb3...
The Complete Playlist argues for shuffling and serendipity for achieving accidental surprise and delight and clever juxtapositions, something that if you had an actually competent DJ could be guided and not left to chance.
A competent DJ makes musical arguments in relation to an aural environment in the same way a competent Philosopher may make intellectual arguments in relation to an environment of ideas.
When "me" is most classical music and this is a music platform I think the critique is not unwarranted. They could adapt it with special system prompts for classical.
There is a long history of using AI to analyze, compose, and perform music.
Atari Cambridge Research- part 5: David Levitt shows Music Box on his Lisp Machine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys
Atari Cambridge Research- part 6: Music box with Tom Trobaugh and drum machine with Jim Davis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhA0FGsin_s
Cynthia Solomon has shared a treasure trove of rare classic videos of Seymour Papert, Marvin and Margaret Minsky, kids programming Logo and playing with turtles, and many other amazing things at the MIT AI Lab, MIT Media Lab, and Atari Cambridge Research:
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> click on the “books” tab - the author is a technologist
That's rather underselling him. Charles Petzold wrote the canonical reference works for programming Win32 and MFC.
It's like calling Donald Knuth a lecturer.