How’s your brat-core, hopeless, pink pilates, doom-scrolling, song of the summer, crush, grwm, clean girl, day going? If you’re anything like me, you check your Spotify daylist hoping for the perfect backtrack to your day when you’re not sure what to listen to. But, oftentimes, you are met with a slew of microtrend jargon and worse, a mediocre playlist. It’s 7:30AM on a school day, but apparently my vibe is melancholy, bed rot, heartbreak. Gosh, you could have at least given me the chance to be happy.
AI has crawled its way into every crevice of the internet. Suddenly, every app is launching its newest “AI Beta technology” which has been deemed sensible for some fields, but not okay for replacing artists’ work. Where do playlists fall on this line? Playlists are just lists, right? Categories of sounds that have elicited similar human emotions.
Robots are good at lists! Coming into teenagehood, every moment had a playlist. My understanding of the world and myself was regurgitated through a stream of songs, each of which felt like they were made just for me. I currently have 396 playlists on Spotify. Are they all good by any definable objective measure? No. Are they all human? Yes.
The latest development in Spotify’s Beta AI is a ChatGPT style playlist maker. Now, at the bottom right corner of your screen is a plus sign with AI Playlist being one of the options. Despite my violent distaste for the development of AI, I gave it a try for research purposes. I inputted the most poetic play-by-play of the moment I could. Here’s what I wrote; “I’m walking home to the house I’ve lived in my whole life. It’s 5:42 PM on what is probably the hottest day of the year so far, summer is coming around in Boston. It is just now cool enough to enjoy it instead of complaining. My feet hurt from my cleats, but the prospect of the summer ahead is bright enough that the pain is quiet, almost welcome.” What Spotify returned to me was “Summer Evening Walk.” Upon opening, the playlist contained a few enjoyable but undeniably TikTok songs (“Lovers Rock”, “This Must Be the Place”, “Right Down the Line”), a few songs I’ve had on repeat lately (“If You Don’t Want My Love”, “Paradise”), and a plethora of Latin club music. Listen, mi gente, I have nothing against Latin pop. But it’s most definitely not what I wanted on this blissful afternoon. As a whole, there were no songs that fit that moment, except maybe “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac—I can always listen to “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac.
All in all, I think we’ve got at least a few more years until the complete robot-takeover-apocalypse. AI may be threatening artistic spaces, but it’s not very good at it. In the meantime, share an album with a friend, make your own playlist for your day, I can guarantee it will be better than anything AI could create.
This article also appears in our June 2025 print edition.
