The great Quartz post ‘The magic that makes Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlists so damn good‘ gives a wonderful insight of the positive brought to us by advanced algorithms and basic Artifical Intelligence.
It goes into the details of how Spotify proposes new playlists based on one’s own preference, the playlists of other members with close preferences, and advanced algorithmic to bring all together into a wonderful proposal of new music tracks.
What I find extremely interesting is how the basis for the value that is created is actually human-produced: the playlists of other people. The algorithm does not find new tracks or discover new musicians by itself. It relies on the curiosity, the knowledge of its members. The algorithm exploits the community effect to create value for all members, leveraging the efforts and chance encounters of all subscribers.
“Spotify is also using deep learning—a technique for recognizing patterns in enormous amounts of data, with powerful computers that are “trained” by humans—to improve its Discover Weekly picks“. That’s where AI comes in to further improve the algorithm. But still at the core are the lists of others and how they interact with them to fine-tune their preferences.
All those algorithms enhance the power of the community but can’t replace it. All original creative data is still created by humans. Algorithms are still only powerful crutches to create value in our lives putting together all these individual contributions.
