Reverse engineering my #1 Hacker News article

Not having a link to the original article in the write-up seems like a bit of an obvious oversight, in a piece about reader engagement no less ;)

Surprised this hasn't been taken down by the admins.

I don't want to discourage this type of retrospective, but we (science-type humans) love to look for causal explanations, and can do a great job of reverse-engineering rationale. Even though I think you did do a bunch of things to encourage engagement, it seems like it's more boosted your luck of getting traction from a very small fractional percent to a slightly larger but still very small fractional percent.

Yes I believe that authentic human creativity is mostly better than artificial. It's like when drum machines became popular in music in the early 80s there was consternation in some circles that this would be the end of drummers. But good drummers like John Bonham, Tony Allen or Vinnie Colaiuta are like magicians whose artistry cannot be replicated in machine form ... but on the other hand drum machines, and electronic 'machine' music enabled incredible vistas of musical creativity.

So maybe AI in music is just another creative toolset that can be used well or badly. My DAW for music creation has auto mastering powered by AI/ML, it does a good job although not as good as a skilled mastering engineer. AI plugins for music composition in DAWs must already exist, they will inevitably get better and more powerful. So I see it as a phenomenon of AI creeping in to our lives rather than a binary dichotomy.

I do think it's problematic - this whole area of AI disrupting the creative arts, and human endeavor in general. I think it's going to carry on creeping into our human creative processes, as new standards of practice and AI acceptance become the norm. We'll still appreciate live musicianship but we won't completely believe it unless we experience it in a live performance.

I agree, the human perspective will remain crucial. I'm torn between being excited by AI-powered creativity and being turned off by it. I will certainly carry on exploring advanced AI tools for writing, music, visual art, etc. for the time being.

For example, I would love to chat with a bot that has a huge memory and context, like a relationship and collaborator, and to train it over many months of conversations so that it becomes like an authentic extension of my creative brain. Then together we could write some serious shit, I'm sure. I think that in the future there may be books written this way that will come to be considered as great works of literature.

But after I play around with AI tools for some time I think I will get bored and will wish to return to a simpler more organic life. Throw away my phone and pick up a paint brush :-)

Looks like the best way to accumulate kudos is to have a bot that watches for new announcements from Apple, OpenAI, etc and then immediately submits the links to HN.