Apple’s AI playlist arena is bad at music

Apple Music: “What do you want to hear?”

Me: “Musical black metal to write about.”

Apple Music: “Here are three metal songs with vocals, A Field recordingthat Surrounding electronic pathAnd a piece of Jazz doom“.

I’m skeptical about AI’s ability to provide the service The music I want At first, but even I was a little surprised by how frustrating the new Apple was Playlist playground Beta is. YouTube music AI playlist generator Far from perfect, but when I gave him the same prompt for black metal, he didn’t offer anything with the lyrics until track five, and that was the exception rather than the rule. Apple Music failed to succeed right off the bat, and did so repeatedly.

I was in a metal mood yesterday, so I also asked Playlist Playground to create me a playlist from the claim, “Modern ambient black metal from the American South.” Apparently, Apple could only find three songs that might fit this criteria. One of them was by the band Women are the earth From South Dakota. Now, I’m American, and so are we Notorious Bad at geography. But I’m 99.999 percent sure South Dakota isn’t the south.

Maybe Apple isn’t relying on black metal. So I tried something I thought would be a little easier and called it “modern kid-friendly hip-hop.” The first track was just a censored version of Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA”. I suppose you could argue that, since it’s the censored version, it technically qualifies.

Next, the censored version of Kid Capri’s song “We are united“, which was released in 1998. I’m a middle-aged man with a very generous definition of what could be called “modern,” but that’s not the case. Six of the 16 songs she added to the playlist were over 15. And three of them were over 25.

The biggest problem was the inclusion of “ABCWritten by Chicken P, it’s an alphabetical list of all the women he’s had sex with and includes lines like, “Desiree, take your dick, she’s telling me to ‘go deeper.’ I’m not sure I need my four-year-old to repeat that to his classmates.

Failure here is especially annoying when Spider verse SoundtrackTyler the Creator Grinch EBand Aesop rock He comes out.

I thought claiming “industrial-influenced dance punk” would be simple enough. I was wrong. I was thinking of two specific groups, Model/actress and Special attention. Neither of them appear in the playlist. Half of it was just old school industrial: Cabaret Voltaire, Einstürzende Neubauten, Ministry, Front 242 and Nine Inch Nails all showed up. But so did New Order’s Blue Monday and Irish rappers Kneecap.

Playlist Playground is in beta, so some issues are obviously to be expected. But based on my findings, I’d say it’s not even ready for public beta yet. Even when it wasn’t a spectacular failure, the results were kind of boring and rarely catered to artists I wasn’t already familiar with. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Apple’s AI playlist maker clearly has a hard time understanding genre, geography, time, and lyrical content. So I gave him one last test and asked him to create a playlist of “Picking up from school on a cold day with no kids music.” Maybe you’ve just put it on Garden State Soundtrack (Shanes, Nick Drake, Jose Gonzalez). But, at least I didn’t have to listen to any of it Barry Grape.