Tag: Tech (page 1 of 1)

December 5, 2024 / 2 Comments

Spotify Wrapped 2024: Not Handled with Care

Dr. Georgie Carroll, an Australian fan Engagement Expert, wrote on LinkedIn yesterday that “Spotify Wrapped learned a hard lesson today: data isn’t enough.”

Indeed.  The true value of data lies in the connections we find and the stories we tell. In the past, Spotify’s human curators would weave these narratives, aligning the recap with the cultural and musical zeitgeist, rather than just showcasing the Company’s technological prowess. 

For example, using the Musical Evolution Cards as a starting point, I delved into my journals, my last.fm profile, and my memories to piece together a narrative that was more than just a jumble of words and AI-generated podcasts.

I posted these cards to my IG story.

I’m a fan of NotebookLM and its potential as a research tool, but the podcast creation here was nothing more than a parlor trick. Until AI can approximate a lived experience that reflects and remixes what it has learned about me and finds something more profound, it is nothing more than soulless novelty.

I want two things from any recap of my content consumption: 

  1. A map of my year that might reveal something that I wouldn’t otherwise see or remember as it was happening
  2. Breadcrumbs that might inform where I should go next in my entertainment journey

Since its launch, Wrapped has been good at showing listeners where they sit in audience clusters on the service. It’s one of the reasons I lament the degradation of The “Sounds of Spotify” playlists over the last 12 months. In 2022 and 2023, Wrapped told me what genres I most enjoyed (with increasing nuance and specificity), and they had playlists that showcased the core sound, pulse, and outer bounds of those genres that I could dig into and follow. New and old music would funnel my way through those algorithmically driven curations and they had a strong hit rate for my ears.

They laid off the person who created Every Noise at Once, the algorithm that powers those playlists, right after Wrapped was released last year. So, 2024 Wrapped features none of those breadcrumbs that would have been generated by this lovingly managed cluster model. Instead, I turned to last.fm again to see if I could determine my preferred genres and subgenres. It’s not nearly the same, but we make do.

With a little effort, I can see that neo-soul, female vocalists, West Coast hip hop, Memphis hip hop, and electronic dance grooves were my genres of choice this year.

When I look to refine and expand my listening in 2025, jazz, including nu-jazz, alt-rnb, post-rock, and LA hip-hop, are subgenres I should explore further.

As tech companies in media trend towards investing in the promise of future tech over people with taste and a fundamental grounding in the living world, we must seek out the storytellers on our own.

I love data, and I love stories. Thanks to last.fm for allowing me to tell my own story independent of digital music platforms. They are not a sponsor of this post, but I have been a fan and a user for nearly 20 years.

April 14, 2024 / 1 Comment

Am I an AI Skeptic or Optimist? Yes

I’m an AI skeptic. That’s not true. I have been cautious about rapidly incorporating AI tools into my everyday work, even as usage and excitement by others have grown exponentially in the last year.

Recently, though, I’ve been playing with AI solutions more frequently. I’ve been frustrated with the quality of Google search results and started exploring Perplexity AI. It was helpful when I looked up information in the heat of NCAAW March Madness and appreciated the structure of the results and the linked references to validate what was provided quickly. There were instances where I needed it to go deeper or in a different direction, but, in general, it felt like I was training up a new research assistant than my future overlord. But, just a few days after using it as my primary search tool, Casey Newton revealed they plan to add sponsored questions into the mix—the exact kind of nonsense I’d been hoping to avoid.

That same week, Axios AI+ and other outlets released several articles highlighting my AI concerns:

AI firms think that anything publicly available is fair game. Like many, I’m stuck on the ethical challenges in developing every one of these models. Most, if not all, ignore their policies, the terms of service of other brands, and copyright law as they scrape the internet for inputs and training materials. We make limited series and movies about how problematic startup and disruptor business culture is, yet we’re watching it happen all over again. 

In general, I think most content-generating AI models make shitty art—though just yesterday, people debated whether a leaked diss track from Drake was real or robot rapping—but it is scary enough for over 200 musicians to protest against AI tech developers collectively. Just because I think most of it is soulless and disturbing if you spend more than just a little bit of time with prompt-rendered images, video, and music, that doesn’t mean bad actors and unskilled keyboard jockeys won’t flood the zone with junk. I have already experienced this with real humans making generic beats while borrowing old vocal tracks from established artists to get into Release Radar and other algorithm-generated playlists on Spotify every week. 99% of these tracks are trash and—I must assume—not benefitting the artists whose coattails they are trying to ride.

Meanwhile, AI is doing little of what we imagine it is. It’s not running the Whole Foods walk-in/walk-out stores. And despite the many influencers I see—and probably muted—who talk about using AI to replace entire chunks of their jobs, this is not a set-it-and-forget-it solution.

We’re exploring AI solutions for business intelligence use cases on my team. Specifically, analysts are using corporate-sanctioned tools to ease the analysis and reporting burden of A|B tests as they increase at a faster rate than the size of our team. AI is a good assistant, but it still requires review and validation. It hallucinates less as our prompt writing adapts to the outputs—note, as we adjust to it and not so much as it adapts to us—but humans are still required as a critical part of the process and will continue to be.

Despite all of these concerns, I’m not afraid of AI. I’m an optimist and inclined to think about artificial intelligence tools as more like the droids in Star Wars: brilliant assistants who are constantly in service of what sentient beings are trying to do.

Let’s ignore General Grievous and his droid army in this metaphor. 

The prequels aren’t very good, anyway.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash