YouTube Music is Testing AI Hosts That Will Interrupt Your Tunes

YouTube's new "Labs" program plans to "offer a glimpse of the AI features it's developing for YouTube Music," reports Ars Technica.

But Ars Technica adds that this future "starts with AI 'hosts' that will chime in while you're listening to music. Yes, really." (YouTube says the AI aims to "deepen your listening experience"...)

The "Beyond the Beat" host will break in every so often with relevant stories, trivia, and commentary about your musical tastes. YouTube says this feature will appear when you are listening to mixes and radio stations. The experimental feature is intended to be a bit like having a radio host drop some playful banter while cueing up the next song. It sounds a bit like Spotify's AI DJ, but the YouTube AI doesn't create playlists like Spotify's robot...
After joining, the YouTube Music app will get a new button on the Now Playing screen with the familiar Gemini sparkle logo. Tapping that will allow you to snooze the commentary for an hour or the remainder of the day. There is no option to completely disable the AI host in the app, so you'll have to opt out of the test if you decide Beyond the Beat is more trouble than it's worth.
YouTube calls it "a way for users to take our cutting edge AI experiments for a test drive," promises that "a limited number of US-based participants can test early prototypes and experiments and influence the future of YouTube. Sign up at YouTube.com/New."

Ars Technica believes "This is still generative AI, which comes with the risk of hallucinations and low-quality slop, neither of which belongs in your music. That said, Google's Audio Overviews are often surprisingly good in small doses."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.