Spotify DJ is like a music pokie

I remember when Spotify DJ showed up in my kids’ Spotify account on my phone. My oldest asked: “what’s that?“. I explained it looked like a DJ would choose songs for you, but the DJ was software aka “AI”, not a real person. “Can we try it?!” he responded excitedly.

I wanted to say no because I don’t like to reward companies adding stupid AI features with my engagement, but I also didn’t know how to explain that to a 6 year old, or want to be a total buzzkill. So we turned it on.

The DJ was laughably bad. It kept trying to play the same 3 songs, it would say things like “here’s some tracks you’ve been in to lately” and play something we’d literally never heard before. My son said “mum, you said this is artificial… intelligence?? It seems pretty dumb”.

Occasionally, the DJ would play one of his favourite songs, and he was so excited. For this reason, he wants to use the DJ all the time. He’ll have me skip the truly bad selections, listen to the okay ones, then celebrate when a good song comes on.

I’d say to him “mate, we can just put on the songs you like”, but no, he would insist on the DJ, and I would shake my head in bemusement. Then I realised what was happening. The fact the DJ gets it right only some of the time is creating a dopamine release. It’s like a musical pokie¹, firing up my kid’s brain in anticipation of a win/great song.

It got me thinking about the AI product I use the most: GitHub Copilot. Readers of this blog will know that I’m a fan. It feels like a net positive for me, like it saves me time. But I can’t help but wonder if the times it “guesses correctly” are truly useful, or if I’m just riding on another hit of dopamine, and I’m too human to be able to tell the difference.

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This has been post no. 5 for #WeblogPoMo2024 and it is what I was interested in today.

Footnotes

1. Australian slang for poker machine or slot machine. ↩