Top 5 Reasons Why We Love Vinyl (& Other Inquiries According to AI)

January 30, 2023

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or avoiding all the fuss and drama collectively known as ‘The Internet’), you might have heard about ChatGPT. If you don’t know already, ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI that uses supervised and reinforced learning to craft user-given questions of any topic they desire to know, basically Wikipedia if it were a Q&A bot. ChatGPT made a whole lot of noise and sparked important conversations surrounding artificial intelligence and how far we as a society are going to take it.

Now obviously, we’re not going to talk about that and discuss the further implications and ethics of AI use in the music industry or what not. Instead, we are rather curious to see what artificial intelligence would have to say when it’s given questions related to what we do best: analog music.

For this reason, we fed ChatGPT several prompts about vinyl records, turntables and analog music in general to give us its artificially crafted insights regarding analog media in a world where streaming services remain predominant in the grand scheme of music consumption. We will also be ranking their answers out of 🤖s, 🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖 signaling the most relevant natural answer while 🤖 being the least. Now let’s take a look!

Question #1: Why do people in the 21st century still love turntables?

Our rating: 🤖🤖🤖/5 ChatGPT gave us a solid response that is pretty accurate yet open-ended enough to be relatable to everyone.

Question #2: What are the top selling albums on vinyl of the 2010s?

ChatGPT’s answer:

Our rating: 🤖🤖/5 ChatGPT played it smart by not giving us a Top 5 list but a list of “some of” the best selling vinyls instead. In terms of accuracy, we’ve found a discrepancy in the bot’s answer in that all entries but “Nirvana’s Vinyl Collection: 1990-1999” appear in all of the top selling lists we have researched, docking off points as a result.

Question #3: What’s better: vinyl records or digital streaming?

ChatGPT’s answer:

Our rating: 🤖🤖🤖🤖/5 It is a diplomatic answer that doesn’t decide on either side of the prompts which probably indicates how AIs aren’t really programmed to pick a side(?). What we didn’t expect, though, was the list of pros and cons of each format which adds points to our rating.

Overall verdict:

Though we might not have tackled the ethics of AI in consuming music and other topics that include huge buzz words, we had a great time feeding ChatGPT numerous prompts just to see how it would answer. Overall, it’s a fun tool to use but when it comes to real advice, we believe that nothing beats asking an actual professional.

So, why not end this article with an AI-generated concluding paragraph? Here it is: