After feverish anticipation from fans, Spotify Wrapped is finally here, giving you a look at your most-listened-to music of 2024. Spotify's annual Wrapped feature reveals the songs and artists you've played the most over the year – regardless of whether they're cool or cringey. The viral marketing campaign presents each user's listening habits – including favourite songs and artists – as a slick slideshow lasting a few minutes. However, users have slammed Spotify Wrapped for being'boring' and'ugly' this year, while another angry commentator has complained that it'stinks of AI'. On X (Twitter), one user posted: 'spotify making us wait all that time and wrapped has the most boring visuals and slideshow in years.'

Spotify Wrapped's animated yearly recap of your listening habits--at once beloved and reviled--is back again. But in 2024, the flashy visuals will be accompanied by a brand-new audio add-on crafted with artificial intelligence. Starting today, Spotify users will now get the chance to listen to their annual report as a personalized, AI-powered podcast, in which two synthetic hosts discuss the user's most-played tracks and favorite artists with enthusiasm. The new podcast recap is powered by Google's NotebookLM. If you've used Google's AI tool to generate an audio podcast about a topic you're researching, then the two AI-generated voices in the Wrapped podcast will sound familiar.

At first it looked unbelievable, but Henry Kissinger had died. At 100 years old, news outlets--and the world--had been preparing for the passing of President Nixon's secretary of state for a while. Still, when people were finding out via emoji-filled chain texts, it seemed unreal. Deepfakes, the metaverse, Elon Musk telling advertisers to fuck themselves at a time when X could probably use the money. Perhaps this is why there is a premium on genuineness these days.

This time of year, many people post their Spotify'Wrapped' lists, revealing which songs they played the most over the past 12 months. The online culture magazine The Pudding fed millions of indicators of what it deemed objectively good music, including Pitchfork reviews, record store recommendations'and subreddits you've never heard of.' In addition to rating your taste in tracks, the'How Bad Is Your Spotify?' app will tell you which songs you play too much and which artists you are obsessed with'to an uncomfortable extent.' Launching on Wednesday, it's proven successful enough to trend on Twitter. Logging into Spotify via the'How Bad is Your Spotify' allows the site to review and judge your'awful' taste in music Depending on how high traffic is, it may take a few moments for it to assess your taste in music.

Elon Musk has a talent for describing the most comforting kind of crazy-ass futures. Underground electric robot cars!--sells itself as the world of tomorrow, today. But it's actually the science fiction of yesterday, ripped from the pages of Science Wonder Stories. It's lovely that someone is finally building yesterday's pew-pew science fiction priorities. That's especially true of the latest Muskery, presented last week: a new iteration of Neuralink, a wireless implant that could someday give human brains a direct interface to digital devices.