Apple just rolled out its AI-powered Playlist Playground beta in Apple Music, and early tests reveal a feature that's surprisingly off-key. When tasked with creating an "atmospheric instrumental black metal" playlist, the tool delivered three tracks with vocals, a field recording, ambient electronica, and doom jazz - missing the mark on the most basic requirement: no lyrics. The misstep highlights how far behind Apple's AI music curation lags compared to competitors like YouTube Music, which handled the same prompt with significantly better accuracy.
Apple is learning the hard way that AI music curation is trickier than it looks. The company's newly launched Playlist Playground beta, part of the latest iOS update, is struggling with accuracy in ways that put it behind competitors in the increasingly AI-driven music streaming wars.
The feature promises to generate custom playlists based on natural language prompts, but real-world testing by The Verge reveals a tool that can't quite hear what users are asking for. Reporter Terrence O'Brien requested "atmospheric instrumental black metal to write to" - a specific but not unreasonable ask. Apple Music's AI responded with three metal tracks featuring vocals, a field recording, an ambient electronic piece, and doom jazz. Only two tracks actually matched the core requirement: instrumental black metal.
It's a basic failure that highlights the gap between Apple's AI ambitions and execution. The keyword "instrumental" should be a straightforward filter, yet the algorithm seemingly treated it as a suggestion rather than a requirement. For a company that's built its reputation on intuitive user experiences, the disconnect is glaring.
The comparison to YouTube Music makes things worse for Apple. When given the identical prompt, Google's AI playlist generator didn't serve up a track with lyrics until the fifth song, and that was an outlier rather than the pattern. While YouTube Music's tool isn't perfect either, it demonstrates a better grasp of parsing and prioritizing user intent.
