"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
Earlier this summer, the company rolled out a new feature called “Talk to Spotify,” allowing Premium users to interact with the platform more conversationally via a chatbot interface.
“I feel like Spotify is coming alive, and you can literally start talking to it,” Söderström said.
The level of delusion is phenomenal.
My $BRAND has a voice now, and you must worship it
Is that the feature I go out of my way to avoid?
Like all I want is search and play. Maybe saving artists and playlists if you’re fancy.
The tool has yet to launch, but when it does, it will be a paid add-on.
They think people will pay extra for this?
I choose to parse “tool” as a disparaging epithet in this context, instead of the classical definition
They patted themselves on the back for calling it a "tool", rather than an assistant, or some other anthropomorphic term.
"See, we're being honest with our users. That has to count for something."
They'll move the no-ads thing to it so then they can show the shareholders how great AI is for their business even though people only get it to get rid of the ads.
“I feel like Spotify is coming alive, and you can literally start talking to it,” Söderström said.
I don't want to talk to my tools, I want them to do things. Introducing a layer where misunderstanding is rampant (conversation) is a horrible experience.
I'm starting to get the feeling that AIs are a lot like monorails.
Yeah, same here, so many cases they want to champion a "conversation"... No, I want the simple and precise interactions for these things, maybe a chat can work for a 'search' dialog, but for a music player, it's job is to play music, and let me skip to next on occasion.
Similar for fast food ordering. The kiosks and apps frankly I've liked the option to enter my order precisely without a clerk to mess it up. Advocating for chat for those is a step backwards too.
At this rate, I am more likely to cancel my payments to them enitrely
Do it! There are plenty of open source alternatives, like Bandcamp, Deezer, etc.
I’m so glad the stock tanked as a very direct result.
I’m also glad I ditched them after they started letting ICEatzgruppen run ads on their platform.
Someone posted a video for a song the other day and I thought it sounded pretty good. Then I found it on Spotify and saw the credits showed it was composed with GenAI The fact it did actually have a real human singer threw me off because I could feel something from it, which I don't with 100% AI music. Bummed me right the fuck out.
I'm a musician. Music is a really big part of my life. I like weird music. I'm up to date on the latest AI audio models.
I've been tricked multiple times already. I can no longer tell something is AI generated music or not just from listening to it.
I really, really don't like that.
partake in this AI tailwind
some limitations and more ads than before
A completely natural part of the enshittification playbook
Of course they do. That way they don't have to pay any musicians. Just flood the entire platform with slop.
I've been listening to this channel called Weird A.I., that does all these parodies of famous songs. The A.I. that does it is really clever, it just needs more accordion.
I want two things: a shitload of music, and an awesome way to manage a personal library of favorites.
WinAmp nailed this 30 years ago, fuck off with the big touch target negative space design and broken search, forget podcasts, audio books, blablabla.
It really did whip the llama's ass.
Those spotify execs really have their finger on the pulse. Their grotesquely huge bonuses grew three times that day. /s
Abso-fucking-lutely not
They’ll pay themselves and problem solved. Isnt what tech giants always do? They circulate their worm money in between
Not quite. The money is supposed to be injected with a little outside cash every turn in order to keep growing, but that means you need customers. Some industries can tap the government's pockets for that, but Spotify will have it more difficult in that regard.
LOL, you'd have to pay me to listen to AI slop.
And where are all the Spotify defenders claiming that "buht Spotify banned AI slop!!" ?
Spotify has been upping its experimentation with artificial intelligence recently, banking on a slew of new AI-driven product features to continue the rise in paid subscriptions.
“There is plenty of industry debate about AI investment and costs,” Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström said on the company’s earnings call. “Our view is that being an AI beneficiary means winning on the cost side too.”
Shooting themselves in the foot. Most artists already pay more into Spotify to setup and promote their work than they make from royalties. Now they want to cut the Artist out. Braindead execs.
The only thing that I occasionally hit Spotify for is the user generated playlists. Like that’s it. I then copy them over to other platforms. So it sounds like they aren’t making playlist improvements and are just throwing out random ideas for the joy of AI. I assume I can ask any other AI platform about the origins of a band or song so not sure what the differentiator there is. I’m sure they would love to sell access to AI music just like they were able to pay a lot less for podcast materials and want folk to pay for that as well. Anything to not pay musicians I guess.
Give ListenBrainz a try. You can use their app to scrobble your listens, or some apps support scrobbling natively. Then they make you playlists weekly based on what you've been listening too.
best part about them is that they are mostly open source and provide an ethical alternative to the curation algos.
Scrobble, verb; To publish one's media consumption habits to the Internet via software, in order to track when and how often certain items are played.
(Etymology: From the name of the Internet service 'Audioscrobbler', probably a nonce coinage perhaps based on scribble.)
I want a world of abundance where all humans share equally in the fruits of automation. Where the only thing that we NEED to do is make art. I don't want a world where AI makes "art". I think a lot of people from nearly ever age group associate music strongly with human expression and culture. No wonder this isn't popular.
On the positive, Tidal recently added a toggle to block AI music. Naturally I flipped it right away.
Man how hilariously detached.
Huh, I thought I read the opposite previously where they were scrubbing a bunch of AI music.
Yeah I was real skeptical about that. If you want to filter AI slop, use Tidal. It labels AI and you can set it so that they can't even be played. Of course it isn't 100% accurate, but I was impressed by how many it caught