From the article:

> Am I naïve in expecting Artificial Intelligence to be smart? Is my interpretation of the word “intelligence” too literal? And when an AI behaves stupidly, who’s to blame? The programmers or the AI entity itself? Is it even proper to make a distinction between the two? Or does the AI work in so mysterious a way that the programmers need no longer take responsibility?

IMO this is a programming/prompting failure - not a failure in the general capability of 'AI'.

We can prove that an AI can understand this with a basic prompt:

https://chatgpt.com/share/69b67906-0e18-8012-9123-718fc6422c...

This is a minimal base prompt, with no fine-tuning, with the same user prompt, which shows that an AI will respond correctly by default. Presumably either the AI they are using is a weak model, or their prompt is encouraging the model against this (e.g. maybe the prompt says 'return one song based on the suggestion, and then songs from similar artists after')

> I’ve heard people claim that an AI can compose music. But how can that be when it can’t even grasp basic concepts in music?

Trying to infer the underlying capability of AI to generate music based on a badly-prompted Spotify DJ feature is always going to have it's limits. The proof of 'can AI compose music' will be in the eating of the pudding. AI models have already been able to compose classical music to some extent, and can grasp music theory, so after this point it's just going to be a matter of quality/taste.

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xattt 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> maybe the prompt says 'return one song based on the suggestion, and then songs from similar artists after'

What are the chances there is or will be a prompt to direct listeners from artists with higher royalties to those with basic fees?

If I was an MBA, this would absolutely a direction I would take.

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arrrg 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you try to shift the blame to the user. All the prompts were crystal clear. Trying to shift any blame on user error is non-sensical stupidity or dumb manipulation in this case.

Also, might I recommend looking at the way the world is, not the way the world might be. This is one of the ugly AI tendrils this disgusting industry is putting into everything, bringing ruin to the world. This is the actual reality of it, making the world a dumber, less interesting more stupid place.

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Closi 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you try to shift the blame to the user.

I'm shifting 'blame' to Spotify, rather than the user or the AI model - although blame is probably a pretty strong word anyway for what is probably just supposed to be a fun DJ feature.

> All the prompts were crystal clear.

We don't know what the prompt is, because the FULL prompt will be a combination of the base prompt plus the user prompt. It's trivial to show that a modern model with a minimal base prompt will return correctly (as per my original post), so IMO there is probably something in the base prompt which is encouraging the model to return differently.

I wanted to clarify the first two points, but i'll not respond to the rest of your comment as it's a bit overly-emotive (calling what I say disgusting, rambling about the downfall of society as a whole etc).

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foltik 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Pretty sure they were saying it was a skill issue on the part of the Spotify engineers writing the internal system prompt for their slop DJ.

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phony-account an hour ago | parent [-]

> it was a skill issue on the part of the Spotify engineers writing the internal system prompt for their slop DJ

Spotify are currently making a big deal about not writing any code - I attended a webinar this week where one of the slides proudly trumpeted this fact:

“ 0 lines of code

Spotify's best engineers have not written a line of code since December.”

	▲	criddell an hour ago \| parent [-]
		December? I would have guessed it’s been longer than that.

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joegibbs 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Disgusting" is a strong term to use regarding a poor quality music chooser

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mikkupikku 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you try to shift the blame to the user

Users are often to blame in many varied cases and there should be no taboo around discussing this. I think maybe some people hear that you should never blame rape victims for rape and then go running wild trying to apply that as a general principle of never blaming anybody who is in any way a victim of anything, even when the "victimhood" is simply some piece of trivial software not working well. But we're not talking about rape so your intense rejection ("disgusting") is completely off the mark.