Walking through Goodwill one day I saw a stack of albums with “French wedding songs from the 1800s” tossed on top. AHHH I wanted to buy immediately, but our move to NYC meant getting rid of frivolities like my record player.
The joy of discovering new music only happens in serendipitous occasions now, because Spotify and every other algorithm already “know” exactly what I want to hear and only show me content “made for Sara Hill.” It’s in the same arena as every marketer’s soul destroying proclamation of “delighting customers with the right message at the right place at the right time.” (I literally can’t even type that without sadness. One time when I was searching for jobs, I put on my LinkedIn that I “delight customers” and I still hate myself for that.)
Spotify “knows” that I only want to hear Macarena because one time 8 years ago I got really excited (not having heard it for a while) and accidentally hit a curb in a parking lot. If I am lucky enough to hear a new song in the wild and search it on Spotify, its immediate reaction is HOW ABOUT LISTENING TO MACARENA NEXT?
No … I want to keep listening punk rock covers of Taylor Swift.
WHAT ABOUT A MACARENA REMIX? MACARENA STRING QUARTET PERHAPS?
How about I search for something upbeat? I have a long run and need motivation.
YOU KNOW WHAT’S UPBEAT? MACARENA!
Last week my friend messaged me that he’d been using ChatGPT’s “memory” feature where it remembers conversations and can make more personalized recommendations for you. To its credit you can easily turn off this feature, which you seem unable to do with applications like Spotify and every other website on the internet.
You can also ask ChatGPT to change what it knows about you, a feature that’s rather interesting for the fact that it also seems to be easy. To solve debacles like Spotify playing the same handful of songs it knows you like you have to research a bunch of tricks, do this, don’t do that etc.
But why would generative AI retain the ability to turn off chat memory when everything else we do on the internet falls firmly in the realm of gross invasion of privacy? Typically I am positive about the prospect of AI augmentation in our lives now and into the future, but my hope is that gen AI doesn’t fall into the same mistakes marketers and advertisers have been making for years.
The thing about most technology “knowing” me is it somehow misses the point that what I want is unfiltered discovery. I’d settle for temporary breaks from constant seeing and hearing about things I expressed mild interest in once.