At the risk of stating the obvious, ai is absolutely everywhere lately. There is ai in your car, ai in your messaging app, ai in your glasses. I've become pretty desensitized to all of this as a workplace hazard, but it was Spotify's ai DJ that really caught my attention.
I've listened to top 40 radio stations for the past two decades, so I'm familiar with the concept of a robot choosing music for me. In that context, an ai DJ doesn't seem like a stretch. But after using it on and off for a week, I'm convinced it's the perfect analogy for our ai-everything moment. It's eerily human and plays a lot of music I like. But take it from someone with access to a high-quality local independent radio station – one that employs human DJs! —There is simply nothing like the real thing.
Spotify's ai DJ has been around since early 2023, but it piqued my interest recently when I was searching the app for some easy-to-use tunes to work with. The ai voice greeted me by name and then, after a short preamble, told me that it had selected some “dreamlike and neo-psychedelic waves.” When the music started, I was bothered by how extremely shitty it was. I shouldn't have been surprised, considering Spotify has almost a decade of data on my music listening habits. He also drew on my previous listening for the next song: a Classixx song, whose Hanging Gardens Album I listened to on repeat last year. But as I listened Hanging Gardens on Spotify, I didn't discover it there. Yo I first heard it on KEXP. – a local station where real humans choose the music.
Look, here in Seattle we are very spoiled. Among the conglomerate-owned and robot-programmed stations, we have one truly honest independent station on our radio dials: 90.3, to be precise. I started listening to KEXP through their online stream years before I moved to Seattle. Being a local has only made me more of a fan; I celebrated the opening of the “new” KEXP location in 2016 and saw one of my favorite bands. play a free show in the studio There not long before they separated. I have logged countless hours working on my laptop in the community meeting space. Being able to go on my favorite radio station and just hang out is still cool all these years later. I wish every city in the country had a KEXP.
It's not that I like everything I hear on KEXP. ““Friday's song” It's banned in my house because my husband and I are sick of it. And no matter how hard I've tried, I can't get in. wet leg. It's my problem. But that's the goal of a radio station, right? You hear some things you like and some things you don't like as much. Maybe you hear a song you forgot but love or a band you like that you've never heard before. It's a complete meal, while an ai-curated set feels like a dessert buffet. They're all things you love and they're great at first, but after a while they give you a stomach ache.
It hits differently than when it comes from an algorithm.
In the age of Spotify algorithms and top 40 stations, a DJ can seem like an abstract concept. But KEXP DJs are very real people I see out in the community, hosting local music festivals and shopping at the co-op grocery store. It's an obvious but crucial difference. When a real human plays a song that you really like because they I also like it a lot, its impact is different than when it comes from an algorithm.
Being on air and sharing music is “a way to connect with thousands of people around the world,” says Evie Stokes, KEXP DJ and host. Driving time. “It's a great way for me to be honest and have the accountability and community that I think we desperately need.”
His connection with the public is built through music and together with it; Stokes has shared his journey to sobriety with his listeners. “Every time I talk about it on air… I get a flood of messages from people who are going through similar paths in their lives.” That connection simply cannot exist when the only thing running the station is a robot.
One of the disadvantages of working as a writer is that I find it basically impossible to listen to the radio while I work. I can't write songs with lyrics and I definitely can't write while a DJ is talking. So I turn to Spotify a lot during the workday and have been listening to a lot of “lofi” and “smooth jazz beats” playlists while blogging. I also used another of Spotify's ai features: ai-created playlists. For the purpose, they are fine. Best of all, I don't want a human to choose the music for me. I tell the computer what mood I'm in and it creates a playlist of songs that fit the task.
If nothing else, the ai DJ is a sort of totem for the particular ai moment we're in. Generative ai is all the rage and tech companies are busy introducing it into every nook and cranny of every product they make, whether you have any business there. Or not. There are many things that ai can and will probably do for us in the near future. But replacing a real human being, especially in creative applications, is not one of them. Take it from the Polish radio station that tried (and failed spectacularly) replace your human presenters with ai characters.
A podcast is just humans talking to each other.
Does anyone really want an ai DJ calling them by name? Anyone want an ai-generated direct message from their favorite creator? Anyone want to have a Zoom meeting with their ai avatar? Maybe, but I think tech executives pushing for more of these things are vastly overestimating this demand and underestimating the value that a real human being brings to an exchange. People I want to listen to podcastsfor the love of God. A podcast is just humans talking to each other. Conceptually, listening to a podcast is as advanced as gathering around the radio to listen to your favorite show, like people did a hundred years ago. Some things are constant.
The day I started listening to Spotify ai DJ, that afternoon I got in the car to pick up my son from daycare. DJ Riz was presenting Driving time on KEXP, and the first thing I heard him play was Lesley Gore's “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows,” released in 1963. It's a bop as syrupy-sweet as the candy of the title. Riz followed that with Love from Mos Def's 1999 album Black on both sides. I'm sure I wouldn't have heard any of those songs on my own that afternoon, much less one after the other. But it worked and the juxtaposition made me smile. You just don't get that kind of thing with ai.
