A little Monday morning rant to warm me up for the week.
You’ve probably noticed that Spotify has added an AI-generated “About The Song” section within each song’s interface. As one might expect, it’s cack. It isn’t generating facts and backstories, a la “Behind the Music” from the 1990s (damn that was a fun show).
Instead, it is doing what AI tends to do, which is being what someone memorably called The Mansplainer 3000. It’s just vomiting up word garbage which uses a lot of words to say nothing.
I occasionally check what it says about the song I am listening to just for the point of the experiment. I have never seen a single summary which didn’t scream “someone said we need to use AI because AI and I want to impress my manager with AI.” That’s it. That’s the whole reason this section is in Spotify now.
Which is why I picked this particular example to demonstrate it, and I am really showing my 90s Greenwich Village indie phase here: the song which is the source of my favourite lyric of all time*, which is How Am I Different by Aimee Mann, from her 2000 masterpiece Bachelor No 2 or the Remains of the Dodo.
The song itself is seething rage about having her talent manipulated and exploited, time and time again, by the corporate music machine of the 1980s and 1990s. Hence that album, which she went out on a limb and released herself: and this was a massive, massive thing in the era of physical media and music conglomerate dominance. No one had ever done that before. She did. I had to pre-order a copy of the CD from an indie distributor who sent it to me in the post. This was revolutionary. Seriously.
Enter Spotify, which summarises the achievement as follows:
Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Exhibit A
So what do you notice there.
The first thing you may have noticed is the vapid word vomit which describes, um, how music works. According to Spotify’s AI, songs are made using instruments which vary in volume and prominence. Holy shit! Who knew!
But if that was the first thing you noticed, you failed the test. What’s the first thing you were supposed to notice?
That summary does not mention Aimee Mann at all: remember her, the artist who actually wrote and performed the song? It only mentions her producer. (An absolutely capable and amazing producer to be sure.)
But the AI has erased from her own work.
Her own work, which was about the corporate exploitation of her talent and labour until she put her foot down and said no and did it her own way instead.
And here it’s come full circle 26 years later: with those same horrors being stamped onto her work yet again.
Nothing ever changes.
We’re boiling the planet for this.
And I’ll be on the sidelines, with my hands tied, watching the show.
*The greatest lyric of all time
“Just one question before I pack:
When you fuck it up later, do I get my money back?”
