What a baffling take.
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.
I guess I’m just separating out the fact that I agree with the OP from my criticism of the way the argument was presented.
There’s a reason there’s no deterministic recommendation engines. How would that even work?
Doing something previously impossible isn’t “lazy”.
Don't try to deflect with pedantry.
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.
You don’t use a DJ feature(/any recommendation feature) to play specific songs, you use the search bar. Again, a recommendation system that gave you just exactly what you asked for wouldn’t be a recommendation system!
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.
> The Spotify DJ is a recommendation engine.
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?
>If you press play on the music player on your phone, do you expect it to “try something different?”
I expect it to make a playlist containing the opposite of my taste, like I asked! :)
(YMMV on how good it is at this)