I Defeated the AI That Roasts Your Spotify Taste

I Defeated the AI That Roasts Your Spotify Taste

Disappointments are a natural part of life. Sometimes you buy a new game that doesn’t live up to the hype, or you end up with a new gadget that, while cool in concept, is actually kind of useless. In my case, that meant (possibly) breaking a playlist-roasting bot that my coworkers and colleagues were raving about.

The bot in question was built by the good folks at The Pudding in order to — as they put it — ”[judge] your awful taste in music” by scanning over your Spotify playlists. If you ask it what its credentials are, it’ll tell you that it’s been trained on a repository of more than two million “indicators of objectively good music,” including “Pitchfork reviews, record store recommendations, and subreddits you’ve never heard of.”

The drags continue from there. This bot isn’t afraid to call your playlists “albanian-pop-agenda” levels of bad or rib you over how basic your musical tastes might be. It’ll ask if “ur ok” after scanning your playlist, and if you tell it that you’re not, it’ll remind you that it’s just a neural net and that it actually isn’t capable of caring at all.

At least that’s what I’m told. When I tried loading my own Spotify account into the system, it seemed to briefly crash before telling me that Spotify was “limiting how many people can use this app at once, so you’ll need to wait or try again later.”

Assuming it was a problem with my Chrome browser, I tried opening it on Safari, only to get the same response. Then I tried on mobile. No matter where I went, this bitchy bot refused to even look at me. The Pudding team told me to try loading the program again and see what happened. Nada.

Given that the bug followed me across multiple platforms and devices, I have to assume that the problem isn’t with the bot itself, but something with my Spotify account. But what exactly? Maybe it was those Linkedin-branded playlists that I downloaded? Or my playlist that’s nothing but hours of looping train sounds? Maybe all of the Enya in my catalogue caused the bot to short circuit. I truly couldn’t tell you.

Personally, I want to think that my musical tastes are just unroastable — even by a bot as cool as this one.

You can check out The Pudding’s project for yourself here.


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