How Bad Is Your Spotify? website
How Bad Is Your Spotify? is an allegedly artificially-intelligent tool built by Mike Lacher & Matt Daniels for The Pudding – “a digital publication that explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays”. It uses your Spotify listening data to make fun of you. Its landing-page title is set in Recoleta, which gets a lot of web use considering its very analog 1970s flair. The Spotify-style album covers are set in their brand font LL Circular.
> Initializing neural net…
> Training on 79,032 indicators of objectively good music…
The webpage is visually minimal, putting type front and center – the “AI” script is typed out for you in Inconsolata over a sprawling white background, keeping the focus on the embarrassing content in a way reminiscent of ancient text-based computer games as it occasionally stops to ask the user for confirmation (“do you really listen to this?”). The buttons, which typically present options that already sound like you’re ashamed, are set in Atlas Grotesk.
It seems more like a regular data tool than a real AI, but the writing is dripping with lowercase contempt in a way that feels alarmingly like a smug friend or music reviewer dressing down one’s taste, or reads alarmingly like one of Jon Bois’ anthropomorphized space probes from 17776.
I’ve bravely submitted my own Spotify data to be roasted for these screenshots.
I’m not convinced this thing is truly an AI in any meaningful way, but it is rude.
I refuse to be shamed by a robot. Moon Crystal rocks. (I do appreciate the “I share this account” option to worm your way out, though.)
Come on, those aren’t just comedy bands!
