My Eerie Vulcan Mind-Meld with YouTube Music’s AI

A mute machine intelligence could be your psychoanalyst and therapist without you realizing it

I ruminated for several weeks about whether to write about this experience because I wanted to be sure I wasn’t imagining it. I don’t think so. 

Music is my therapy. I deal with torrents of information every day in my work and hobbies. When I feel overwhelmed by it all, I periodically retreat into the world of music.

I have always thought that music is humanity’s emergency, secret, primal backchannel. It is how we communicate with, and inculcate one another on an emotional level. Our music is probably why aliens are not able to conquer us—they can’t understand it. Probably, though, dark forces do know very well how to use popular music against us. I think there is strong evidence for this.

This story begins with a serious crisis I underwent in May. It’s partially documented in my articles, Ho’oponopono and Ho'oponopono is Miraculous!

In healing my grief, I retreated into music therapy on the ninth day. That night, a strange phenomenon began to happen. The YouTube Music auto playlist began feeding me songs that I had not listened to or even thought of for decades. Many were ones I was tangentially familiar with from childhood, whose lyrics and subject I was not even aware of.

I started listening to the lyrics intently and realized that they were surprisingly relevant to the situation I was wrestling with. Many of these songs encode perennial pathological relationship problems that are well understood in relationship psychology, but that the average person is unaware of. If they were properly understood, we would not be seeing the explosion of pathological relationship dynamics that is all around us. 

I was very impressed by this and began to wonder just how well YouTube’s (Google’s) AI knows my mind, emotions, subconscious, and relationship issues. It’s not like other AI tools that talk to you and answer your questions. It silently models your listening habits, your preferences, your cycles, your moods. It seemed to implicitly know what I needed to hear in those moments. It seemed to prescribe music therapy to me.

I began building a playlist out of these suggestions and listened to this for days. I found it to be very beneficial. Then things got really weird…

During those days I happened to get a notification from Google Play Store suggesting that I might want to know whether my reviews were noticed and helpful to anyone. It just so happened that at the top of the list was an old review I left about YouTube Music. I had given a bad review because initially I was disappointed with its strange user interface and I said so.

But it was now out of date, especially as I began to be impressed by the quality of its suggestions. I revised my rating to four stars, noting how pleased I was with this but I also remarked that in spite of this, its selection of Brazilian music was still terrible. I said that it only found low quality, homemade videos because I was recently looking for particular songs that had lyrics captions and translations and I was not having any luck.

This is where something beyond coincidental began to happen. It is impossible to explain away. 

Suddenly, the next day while I was still grieving and meditating on my complicated and confusing relationship with a gal in Brazil with whom I have been very close to for over a decade, YouTube Music began to feed music that was uncannily relevant.  

Here it is necessary to describe the manner of our communication to understand why I was so shocked. Much of our communication is non-verbal, at the emotional and memetic level. We share songs, videos, tender Instagram clips. If anyone has spent any time on Instagram or TikTok, they know that many of these clips have universally famous music sound bites whose artists are relatively unknown. They are, for the most part, anonymous “one-hit wonders.”

That day YT Music began feeding me several of these songs in their entirety from the original artists. I was totally unfamiliar with the artists, yet I knew the music like the back of my hand and these were poignantly significant in our relationship.

One of these had lyrics in French. I didn't even know there were lyrics, because the clips were always instrumental segments. I pulled up the lyrics and many translations of them. I was shocked to find that they are very specific to my emotional dilemma.

Not only that, but the next music videos served to me had the lyrics translated into Portuguese—composited onto the video; they were not simply auto-translated captions. To me this implies that the AI on some level understands the content of the lyrics and went out of its way to find versions that had composited translations in the language that my love would understand. It knew that I had been looking for such music videos.

The auto play continued to feed a sequence of other songs that are very meaningful to the two of us, that we had shared with each other over the course of ten years on other platforms. Many of them were her favorites, though not mine. These also had composited translations. It also suggested many other songs from Brazil that I was not familiar with, but again, whose content was eerily, very specifically relevant. 

I have added all of these songs to my ‘therapy’ playlist and this has been very healing and helpful in my journey. But it begs questions about just how much this AI comprehends our music, how well it understands our individual psyches, what it knows about our personal relationships, and how it might be in some way, our doctor.