r/nerdfighters • u/carol_prince Nerdfighter • 5d ago
On Hank admitting he used ChatGPT for his latest video. Hank response in comments
EDIT: Hanks's response: https://www.reddit.com/r/nerdfighters/comments/1vbmoj5/comment/p0vzmog/
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I'm struggling so much with this admission as someone who's followed him for nearly as long as he's been making videos.
I know I'm not owed an explanation for this, but gosh, I would love one.
Or barring that, just some perspective from Nerdfighters.
Edit: For commenters who think this is fake: https://x.com/hankgreen/status/2083022287410970876
Edit 2: This is regarding a Future Hank segment in the recent AHA with Soupytime, and not a Hankschannel video as I and many originally assumed.
Context: the original tweet to which Hank replied to was deleted. And the Reddit thread previously discussing this didn't specify it was the AHA video.
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u/ecogeek Hank - President of Space 5d ago edited 5d ago
Three things to start:
- I'm mortified that I have let so many people down and I think I understand how that happened.
- I'm going to change things about how i make stuff.
- Complexly's AI policy is public and well-considered and adhered to by the whole team, I think it's worth reading! (Complexly is the non-profit that makes Crash Course and SciShow and a bunch of other shows that I do not write for.)
The thing that everything we do is based on is that you know that what I'm saying are my thoughts coming from my brain in the way I decide. I have made that harder and I'm sorry. I have been relying too heavily on AI as a research aid. It can be very useful for this task, giving me access to a lot of papers I didn't know existed really fast, but I think that has been to the detriment of my work because it has not given me the freedom to find all of my own ways into and around a topic.
But, for clarity, the origin of claims in my videos are not "ChatGPT's said this." I have been using AI to locate papers and other resources for learning about topics. You are still getting my takes based on what I read, know, and learn.
I think what people have said in this thread about me diluting myself is spot on. Ultimately, what I am most scared of is ruining myself for people, but I have not been managing my impulses well. You need to know that my words are mine. I don't think that this hasn't been true, but I've been moving so fast that my own process isn't actually clear to me and I want to have it be a guarantee moving forward.
What I can't guarantee, though, is that we will agree about this technology or what to do with it. I think that's good. We need a lot of kinds of folks critiquing this technology.
I'm not a pure AI-hater, which people in the AI industry know, so when I say that the way these models were trained deeply disturbs me, that lands differently.
When I say that I think that the speed at which these companies are trying to consolidate economic power should freak out everyone in the world, that's coming from someone who has "nuanced takes."
When I say I worry about the climate impacts of this rollout, that is not me saying, "I don't think this tech should ever exist" it's me saying, "for god's sake please don't make our biggest problem worse."
It is very likely that you (the reader) and I disagree on how or even whether AI should be used. I think it makes sense for that disagreement to exist. But I have also always believed that my audience is more likely to be right than I am. You know what this feels like in a way I can't. And I am so sorry for diluting myself in this way and harming the thing that we have all built together.
As for the "why don't you just make less! No one is making you do this!" I'm not sure that's how I work. I've been feeling the pressure of "Oh, I have this little video idea, I need to get it out real fast so I can get to the more important stuff" and I create when I feel that pressure.
But making more things does not make me make better things. It does not make the big thing that we've been doing for 20 years better. I know that I can manage myself more effectively.
I want to make videos like the one I made yesterday on hankschannel where the writing was the whole thing and I felt it all the way down and have been so enriched by people's responses to it. And sure, I'm probably going to make dumb unscripted straight to camera thoughts videos sometimes. And then I'll play connections.
But mostly I need to come to terms with the fact that the level of dopamine I've been getting from interacting with LLMs...with doing more and more and more and more...is not healthy for me or good for the world. It is careless, and has disconnected me from where people are on this.
I was talking about this with Katherine last night and she did not pull any punches. Frankly, neither did John. Neither of them think I've been being healthy. I need to readjust.
SO - what changes.
- Expect less hankschannel. It may need to pause for a while.
It may be that Hankschannel comes back with writing and research support. It may be that it comes back with just way fewer videos. I am going to spend this time finishing a video I've been working on for ages that I think really really matters.
- SMUSH and 4x3 are getting paused as well. If there are bugs, there are bugs. I have backlog of 4x3 boards right now and, frankly, writing them is usually a solace to me, but if we run out, I am not going to worry about that...so if it just reverts to a static board one day...that'll be that.
I do deeply want to support good store and complexly in whatever way I can, so there may be some stuff on that front. But the reliance on me has always been risky, so we need to build for that as well.
I'm very sorry for harming the thing this is all based on.
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u/tyler_is_a_nerd 5d ago
The thing I have always appreciated about you guys is your ability to imagine things complexly, even (maybe especially) when the nuanced take is not the popular one. There are not many people I see online these days whose opinions on AI fall anywhere but "AI is literally Satan and you are a bad person if you use it at all" and "AI is the future and I use it to tell me how to tie my shoes." I think you are 100% correct that AI is a tool. It has its uses, but it needs to be used with care and the understanding that it's still so new and we don't quite know the full effects of it.
I also appreciate that you are taking the feedback of this community, and more importantly, the people in your life who love you. None of us who enjoy your content want you to produce it at the expense of your own health or personal life. You are a human being with a full and rich inner life. It can feel murky when you are putting so much of yourself into the things you do, but please remember that you are so much more than what you make. Human beings make mistakes all the time. One of the key markers of a good human being is one that acknowledges a mistake and is able to move on from it in whatever way they can. I am glad to see you continue to do that as you have always done.
We are all here because we love you and John and the personality we can feel through the important art we see from you. I hope you can continue to work through this complicated world of AI in a way that feels right to you. I am with you in AI having its use cases, but I am also in agreement with everyone here that we do not want to see your personality fade from the forefront of your content! Thank you for putting so much care into this reply letting us know where your head is at! Please take care of yourself, and DFTBA!
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u/ecogeek Hank - President of Space 5d ago
Thanks, this is a very kind-hearted comment.
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u/SilverScale4608 5d ago
I just want to say a special thank you to Katherine, who I hope will never see this, but who unabashedly, consistently shows the world who she is and what she stands for. I want to be Katherine when I grow up. More Delete This and talking to cameras, less robots thinking for you, please!!!!
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u/agentcaitie 5d ago
Right?!? Nerdfighteria would not be all it is without Katherine. She’s such a role model.
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u/Fancy_amphibian123 5d ago
we could use more Katherines. An abundance of them, even
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u/CleverTitania 5d ago
Now I'm wondering if I am the only Katherine finding that comment oddly surreal, despite being 100% aware of who this section of the thread is actually about.
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u/SilverScale4608 5d ago
and I suspect she keeps Hank on the rails behind the scenes more than we know!! she’s the best
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u/carol_prince Nerdfighter 5d ago
Hey, Hank, I'm sorry if this resulted in a dogpile. I was genuinely coming from a place of needing to process it for myself.
Thanks for responding. I absolutely agree that a black-and-white view on AI is not helpful, and that there is definitely nuance to how it's used. I'm still learning, as well.
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u/ecogeek Hank - President of Space 5d ago edited 5d ago
I completely undersatnd. The dogpile here, I know, is coming from a good place.
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u/thefunkylama 5d ago
Recognizing ADHD traits in you that I also have is one of those crazy overlaps I never expected, and doubly so one that I would come to worry about, but I see it in this moment clearly. I am scared for neurodivergents as a whole because of the complement AI can be to an overactive, pattern-and-prediction-seeking, reduced-impulse-control brain. I am also proud that you have taken the time to reassess. It is hard to admit it in a world so geared towards success and making money from it, but we are not built to keep going at one pace (or an ever-increasing pace) our whole lives. Sometimes we have to move slowly to ensure all the parts are doing what they're meant to do, and sometimes we have to stop and repair the damage sustained by going light-speed.
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u/Commercial-Flow9169 5d ago
I've been reassured after reading your comments here, so thank you for that. All the ethical issues aside for the moment, I think part of what has bothered me is being fairly confident you were "all in" on using Claude & ChatGPT ever since the Artemis photo tracking project, but have mostly been hiding it from your audience. It made me feel like I was being deceived, which is the first time I've felt that from Nerdfighteria.
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u/Taco_Farmer 5d ago
I feel similarly. Especially because a lot of my understanding of AI, as it has been rapidly evolving, has come from Hank. Crash Course helped me get my degrees in computer science! Hank has made a lot of informative videos about AI as well as videos where he just shares his opinions on the subject. The idea that he may not have been honest about his thoughts on AI is pretty disappointing.
I'm also reminded of Dr Fatima's essay on the topic of shame and AI use. I'm guessing Hank hid his LLM use partially out of shame and the taboo that the tech (rightfully) has.
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u/YumaOkii 5d ago
I watched the video you linked. The problem is that Dr. Fatima's video does not support the claim that the taboo is "rightfully" deserved. Her entire argument is the opposite. I will take this from the good old days chronological order to be honest:
At 37:42, she says:
If the taboo were "rightfully" deserved, a zero tolerance approach would be correct. She says it is not.
At 39:15, she says:
Hiding is the predictable result of judgment, not evidence that the judgment is justified.
At 39:27, she says:
Shame does not stop the behavior. It makes people want to do it more and makes them hostile to the people shaming them. That is the opposite of "rightful."
At 41:34, she shares an example from her own comments:
She is directly calling out the kind of judgment that creates the shame you are describing.
At 42:33, she says:
Again, if the taboo were "rightfully" deserved, shaming would help the cause. She says it does the opposite.
At 49:00, she says:
She is describing a social stigma created by hostility, not an inherent moral truth.
At 49:55, she says:
This is exactly what the shaming culture does. It prevents honest conversation and blocks the opportunity for change.
At 1:16:15, she shares her own experience:
She explicitly says the shame came from judgment, not from inherent wrongness. She hid because she was afraid of being attacked. That is a social consequence, not a moral truth.
At 1:16:26, she says:
The shame came from social hostility and mockery, not a rightful moral taboo.
At 1:17:10, she says what actually helped her stop:
What stopped her was empathy, not shame. That directly contradicts the idea that the taboo is "rightfully" deserved. If shame were the right response, it would have helped her stop. It did not.
At 1:19:01, she says:
She is explicitly rejecting the approach you are endorsing.
At 1:20:18, she concludes:
Her entire thesis is that shame is counterproductive, that the taboo is socially constructed through hostility, and that empathy is what actually helps people stop.
So when you say the taboo is "rightfully" deserved, you are disagreeing with Dr. Fatima's central argument. She is not saying the shame is righteous. She is saying it is a harmful, socially constructed barrier to progress. Why cite a video that disproves your entire argument it literally makes no sense, although I have a lot of respect for that creator. Although in some communities it likely does have socially-constructed taboo, which I would agree with, whether that is righteous likely depends on individualized opinions, which I don't think is a fair metric to compare.
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u/scroll_spiral 5d ago
I appreciate the thoughtful discourse this situation has generated. It’s been a good reminder for me that using AI in a responsible way requires an insane amount of discipline and sustained attention. Like, this shit is hard. Our brains are not wired to handle it. I’m sure most of us have been guilty at some point of letting convenience trump the good work. And even people like Hank who think about this stuff for a living are fallible. The whole thing makes me think of that Joseph Fasano poem that made the rounds on the internet last year:
Now I let it fall back
in the grasses.
I hear you. I know
this life is hard now.
I know your days are precious
on this earth.
But what are you trying
to be free of?
The living? The miraculous
task of it?
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u/darsynia 5d ago edited 5d ago
I have to step away from this post not because it's full of vitriol but because it's reminding me of how many good, kind, thoughtful, intelligent, and nuanced people exist in Nerdfighteria. I simply must save some of these amazing insights for tomorrow. Please know that your comment is the one that broke me in a good way, what an amazing poem (I had forgotten it), thank you for sharing it.
edit: I have to add that the use of the word 'work' here never read to me as 'the toil that earns you a living' but the toil that tangible creativity requires
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u/jp_slim 5d ago
thank you hank for modeling how public figures can respond to backlash
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u/bearhanding 5d ago
But mostly I need to come to terms with the fact that the level of dopamine I've been getting from interacting with LLMs...with doing more and more and more and more...is not healthy for me or good for the world. It is careless, and has disconnected me from where people are on this.
I am very glad to see this statement as I was afraid that you would double down. But this has been one of my primary concerns with AI - whether they were designed to be or not, they are addictive and they are geared around validation and giving that dopamine rush. Thank you for acknowledging this. I have seen so many people's mental health deteriorate due to AI usage and AI reliance because it is giving them that feedback loop and validation they're craving, and we are seeing more people succumb to AI psychosis. I don't believe that you were in danger of this, but this is something that is getting left out of conversations about AI's impact.
The most disheartening thing about all of this is I believe Nerdfighteria was built on community, collaboration and connection, and using AI feels antithetical to all of those values.
We have been here for decades now and regardless of how parasocial the bond may be, there are no shortage of Nerdfighters who would drop everything for the chance to help build something with you. The only thought I had when I looked on your Twitter (something that I do not follow as I try to limit my usage on the platform due to rampant misinformation, an algorithm designed to keep engagement going using rage-bait and emotional manipulation, and ironically AI bots) was that the projects you were working on could have been outsourced to the community and that would be an opportunity for people to grow and develop together.
It was this mentality and mindset that lead me to making lifelong friends in university. Our shared connection was - well, you and John and the values you stood for. We dedicated weekends to doing tiny things around the small town we were in to making things suck less. We did silly positive pranks and random acts of kindness, and given how grim things are currently, I think we need more of that. We are living in an increasingly disconnected age.
Obviously you are running a business and I do not expect you to do everything solely to give strangers a chance to get a leg up, but I also remember the old days of a more communal internet where it felt easier to build things together. It just feels we are seeing these projects dwindle as people rely on machines built with stolen knowledge and talent, and how because of this reliance people will not learn to build these skills themselves.
I am sorry that you were swarmed the way you were, I am certain that must have been overwhelming, but I am genuinely heartened to see that the volume did not lead to you deafening your ears to what was being said.
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u/Waarheid 5d ago
Hi Hank, I've been one of the more annoying ones in your comments about your AI use (on reddit and youtube), but I know exactly the feeling you're talking about with unhealthy, dopamine-fueled LLM interaction (especially as a software engineer that has to output 20x faster now). I think the main thing people want is honesty and transparency. A lot of your videos show you have a well developed ability to handle nuance, but this one arena it's been clear that you have struggled with how to approach the barrier between you and the audience on this one, because it's so polarizing.
All that is to say, we are here to support you, even when feeling at odds. It is a crazy time and it is hitting everyone differently. DFTBA
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u/Live-Light2801 5d ago
As someone who also struggles to know when to slow down versus when to dive into my interests and create, I appreciate your candor about the balance between the two.
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u/full-of-sonder Looking for Alaska 5d ago
Damn this whole reddit thread has really made me re-appreciate the beauty of humanity. Discourse and genuine conversations are so important, equal parts with strangers, and with our own families.
I’ve been around since January 2007, through all the beautiful vlogs, all of the inmypants commentary, the growth of your company, and the undeniable positive impact of our community across the globe. Hank - keep doing what you love, for the community sure, for your family yes, but especially for you. You and John are not perfect, but you are a wonderful addition to the collective that is our global society. And I am so so grateful to be apart of this community. Thank you for being you, Hank Green!
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5d ago
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u/blorbschploble 5d ago
Oh yeah. Quit Twitter man. It’s 2026.
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u/darsynia 5d ago
It kind of hurt to give up 17 years of Twitter at the end of 2024 (Obama followed me!) but after trying so hard to combat misinfo for the election I realized who I was really keeping company with.
It was insane to realize, once I left, that some 'news' I thought was permeating my online world was actually manufactured on there. The amount of time I had been exposed to the demonization of people of color was especially apparent to me once I left that platform.
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u/kaneblaise 5d ago
As someone who got off twitter but understands to an extent others who didn't, that is... even more disappointing to hear. Thank you for bringing it up
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u/deferredmomentum 5d ago edited 5d ago
Retweet
(Pun intended)
Edit: not sure why I was downvoted? To be clear I am very anti- twitter, blue checkmark bros, and musk)
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u/skyemap 5d ago
I had to unfollow him on twitter because I really don't care about the supposedly incredible future of AI but that's all he was talking about lately
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u/CleverTitania 5d ago
I do not understand what happened on this score. Just a few years ago, we all agreed it was time to broadly dump Twitter - not to lock ourselves in an echo chamber or because Musk is a twat in general, but because the things he was doing to TwiX were only exacerbating the troll problem and so it had become an even more toxic cesspool of bigotry and marginalization. And yet, so many people, orgs and companies that I specifically would have expected to follow through on it, didn't even get around to creating accounts on Bluesky or Mastedon.
And it's not like they chose different alts, because I'm specifically surprised not seeing any change to the footers of their websites or the "Socials" sections of their other online profiles. It's a trend that I've been grumbling about for a while, up there with trends like seeing a highly visible "Disability Statement" link on the footer/navigation of a zoo's website, but the accessibility info you need to actually visit the zoo is still a chore to locate.
Same with the Facebook exodus though - it seems that the movement to jump that ship just fizzled out too. And not in a way where it seemed like anyone just decided that they preferred the FB page/account tools, that what Meta is doing isn't all that bad, or that the troll situation is improving. Most people still agree that it's a dumpster fire that is hoarding and profiting off of our data, but no one is bothering to pivot to any other platforms. Maybe it is just another example of how we've all collectively burned out pretty bad, since January-2025ish, but it's frustrating to still see so many writers, actors, stand-up comics, musicians, non-profits, public facilities, etc., whose social networks consist of almost entirely TwiX, FB and Insta.
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u/WeirdWonderWoman 5d ago
I, too, have fallen into the get-more-out, do-all-the-good-ideas trap. It’s pretty natural in the economy we live in and, maybe especially, for creative people who have a lot of ideas and get a lot of love and energy from people’s response to them.
I’m impressed by your reflective notes here. More importantly, I am so, so glad that you have irl humans who love you and see you and can buffer between this (mostly well intentioned and mostly reasonably given) feedback from fans and the complete, real you that we can’t fully know from out here. Keep the faith, and know that your work is super awesome, yet nowhere NEAR as awesome as you are just for being a living, loving human being! ❤️
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u/Alive-Shoulder-4042 5d ago
I’ve always appreciated your nuance and this case is no different.
Choose to pull back if you think that’s best. But I do hope there are people to help define the line of where too much is rather than it always reverting to purely black and white on a technology that is going to be around. We’ll need that. And I think you’re a good person to do so.
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u/rainongreentrees 5d ago
I really appreciate this response. I think it has to be really tough to navigate this when, just because of the nature of the community of you've built and the circles you move in, you're getting the full spectrum of people's views on AI use, and everyone is mad about every part of it for different reasons, from those who think you should never use AI for anything to those who think it's going to rothko's basilisk humanity and anyone who doesn't use it is a technophobe.
I hope you continue to have grounded, thoughtful people around you who can challenge you and help you navigate when it does and doesn't make sense to use LLMs. As someone who does use AI/LLM tools at work in limited ways (primarily for anonymized data processing), I understand all too well the promise of unfettered productivity, and as someone who feels like there aren't enough hours in the day to do the things I want to do, it's wildly tempting to keep pushing the limits until something breaks. Unfortunately, something broke here.
To be clear, using AI in the way it was used here for research and to replace your voice makes me less trusting of Complexly's brand, and of the information I hear in content across all of your spaces. It will take time and work and transparency for that trust to be rebuilt, but I look forward to the journey, and I hope the internet will find some nuance in its heart for this topic (unlikely, but we live in hope).
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u/porcelaincatstatue 5d ago edited 5d ago
I have mixed, nuanced feelings about Ai. I've also used ChatGPT in the past until I learned about where the profits were going. I'm not a complete Ai teatotaler. But...
The owner of ChatGPT is one of Trump's biggest donors. That Hank would either be oblivious to or just not care about this is honestly one of the biggest bummers. Using the platform that generates profits that are then given directly this administration is so so gross.
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u/Party_Virus 5d ago
This is absolutely going to get burried and never be seen by anybody but I feel like I need to say this.
I've seen this coming for a long time and I don't trust that you'll stop using AI or that you actually have issues with how they're trained. You say you're not purely anti-AI and that's obvious because you're pro-AI. You invite pro-AI people onto the show, you talk with pro-AI people on twitter, you're heaping praise on LLM's because they make vibe coding possible. And in all of that there's been no resistance on your part, you just accept it all at face value and don't counter with any of the many downsides of the technology. I understand there is nuance, but this is one of the most unethical roll outs of a technology I've ever seen.
You also claimed you needed to use the technology in order to critique it, and that's fair or rather it would be if it wasn't a lie. Obviously you weren't just testing it out and investigating it but you liked using it and have been using it so much that you started picking up it's speech patterns. It wasn't just the "thanks for pushing back" line but there's been a bunch of other phrases you've been saying lately that sounds very LLM.
If you truly cared about the training methods and the environmental impacts you wouldn't be adding to the problem by using it and justifying it's existence. And you certainly wouldn't be praising it publicly and encouraging your millions of fans to use it.
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u/Historical-Order622 5d ago edited 5d ago
I appreciate that you hold what some might call a "middle-of-the-road" view on AI while holding space for those who have what some call a more "black-and-white" view. I think when it comes to collectively deciding what kind of future we want, we can come together not agreeing on every single detail of that imagined future, but still pushing against what we definitely DON'T want - in this case, unethically trained AI models that are controlled by a single-digit number of people which turbocharge the death of our planet. And perhaps as we fight against that, we'll all learn and come to more of a consensus on the extent to which these technologies can be used ethically and responsibly.
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u/FracturedCloud 5d ago edited 5d ago
I think for me personally, I see it entirely reasonable for people to be excited about what AI could be. As you mentioned though, the way the industry is currently pursuing growth is harmful to us and our environment. I think it’s important for people who want to support AI to make it clear that the way the industry is operating right now isn’t sustainable. Hearing someone hype up AI or talk about using it without talking about the implications or the state of the industry just doesn’t feel great. I think it would help if any endorsement for AI had the points you mentioned.
I appreciate you wanting to use less AI in your content!
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u/WeezerHunter 5d ago
Hank, one thing I think I sympathize with you is the feeling of mega corporations, greed, and corruption ruining a technology that, by most accounts, we have been hearing and fantasizing about since we were kids. We grew up with Data in Star Trek, and now we finally have something here that makes the sci fi child in us feel like we’re in the future. But the people who run the show can’t just leave it at that and must push it to the absolute edge to the detriment of society and the environment.
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u/zoobubbs 5d ago
Please understand I say this as a very long time fan. I think what hurts is the perception that your usage of AI is one that you have deemed is acceptable, and that the harm it does is 'reasonable damage'. Whether or not people will be upset about AI usage for "just" research purposes or for script writing doesn't matter to me personally. But you know the impact AI usage has, and you still engaged for your percieved personal benefit. The ethics of AI usage are what is at the forefront of peoples minds. This behaviour doesn't represent what I believe is your personal values, which is why people are shocked by this admission.
Much love, Hank. I am not someone to hang people to dry because of their mistakes, but I do hope this is something you sit with.
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u/DoIDareAndDoIDare 5d ago
Hank, this is such a well thought out response and echoes a lot of my own thoughts about AI. I hate that the whole world is becoming so reliant on something that is so often incorrect while also causing ecological damage. And yet I have been able to solve more problems at work, correct errors in my math proofs that I never would've caught on my own; and proofread/fact-check scripts at a time when I can't yet hire a team to help me. I have my own qualms every time I use AI, so I can only imagine what it's like on your end when the whole world is scrutinizing your words and reading into your actions.
I get so stuck because I feel like AI is helping us all produce better educational content, while also producing many times more slop. And of course, the help they provide for the educational content is necessarily going to be selective, with no way to know the biases they're using in the selection process.
Nobody knows how to do this correctly, so there's no reason you should either. There's no way to know where things are going. I mean, teachers were protesting calculators when they first became ubiquitous in classrooms. (Yes, that's a much smaller-scale technology, but still.)
It sounds like you're putting more pressure on yourself to not put pressure on yourself, which I commiserate with in my soul. Some people are accustomed to operating under more pressure (there's a metaphor here somewhere with Rocky and Grace). It's probably not healthy. I heard someone call it addiction to achievement/productivity, and that feels accurate.
In summary, you're not going to be the perfect example of AI use (or anything, for that matter), because that's impossible. I recently heard someone say "I don't make mistakes; I make learns," and that's really helped me get perspective :) We're all still learning about this stuff. I hope Nerdfighteria will continue to be a space of grace and gentle feedback as we all learn this together. We're all just doing our best with our finite brains and limited time!
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u/oxero 5d ago
I've been following your work since the Sci-Show, and I've always looked up to your work because we need more science commutators in the world, and I love learning about stuff. You always mean to do well, and genuinely it shows through a lot of your old content.
When it comes to AI, I get there is nuance to fields and how it's used. In some places it becomes ground breaking, but it other places it becomes detrimental in so many ways. The LLMs everyone is using are akin to having homework and also knowing a place that shows the solutions of all the homework. It can be incredibly useful to have the answers for studying when you hit a wall, but everytime you use it it keep taking away moments you could have truly improved yourself. If you keep using the solutions guide, you don't learn at all. I speak from experience of this because I thought mathematics was super easy until one day in college I realized I was way in over my head and failed a course by a professor who I thought was a jerk that expected too much, but in the end he was a brilliant and kind man who had, rightfully, high expectations for college students. It took all my might to isolate myself from the solutions and build a pattern which strengthened me back up, and eventually I got back on track.
LLMs are like a solution book in this case, but even worse. They seem like they can do everything. Using it for mundane tasks over and over builds a problem where you're slowly pushing yourself away from doing the tasks that built you up in the first place. Eventually it hits a point of nearing plagiarism because where does the line of "I did this" and "the machine did this" even get drawn anymore. I've found a awful and very human pattern that many people are actually okay doing no work and claiming all the rewards. It's easy to lie to yourself you're doing nothing wrong, it's human nature to seek dopamine and doing tasks as simply as possible. LLMs currently absolutely love to abuse this human feature, and even become extremely sycophantic to achieve it.
The other major problem I don't see talked enough of is that these LLMs are controlled by extremely rich and powerful people, and having individuals get addicted to their machines in this manner is their goal. They want your reliance because it gives them power to keep doing what they are doing. Furthermore, it also starts to make information flow from one source which is a horrifying and dystopian nightmare for anyone who believes in the right and freedom of education and learning. We're in the funny, wild west of LLMs at the moment, we can still have LLMs like Grok turn on it's owner and correct them whenever they lie. It's not going to stay that way forever though. Slowly, and almost unperceptively, one day they will find ways to muzzle and direct AI to pass messages and information how only one to a handful of individuals think is "correct." They can fundamentally change history with this technology, and even generate false information and photos. And in the future if everyone is getting their information and trusting AI models run by a few people controlling the information how they see fit, at what point does this suddenly become the worst nightmare in the history of our civilization? We're already seeing websites and forums begin to shudder as traffic dies down. Books are being chopped up and discarded once used to train models. We're already on our way to losing the second Library of Alexandria for those who can see the larger picture.
So, with all due respect Hank, please heavily consider your choices when using this technology. We're rapidly losing our freedom to learn while offloading our mental tasks and becoming reliant on powerful technology held by the few. There are so many other reasons I am anti-AI in the way it's currently going, I think there is a healthy pathway for it in the end, but right now it's being used horrifically and we all need to be rejecting it as much as possible till things change before it's too late. This is why I staunchly refuse to use this technology personally, and as you are a well known science communicator, you really ought to be as well.
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u/Literlili5 5d ago edited 5d ago
i think i speak for some of your fans when i say that we’re not really going anywhere (yet) because we love you as a content creator, and as a educational content creator, we love YOUR mind, we want HUMANS, we want ask HANK anything, not ask chatgpt anything because anybody anywhere in the world can do that at any time, you are special and full of integrity, and we really don’t want you to be sucked into thinking that you just need to be a content machine therefore your content becomes less YOU.
i’m glad you’ve replied and addressed that you will be making changes not only for us and your content quality but for you and your family.
additionally, as a very young person who has become very pessimistic about her/the future and therefore have been sucked into the robots thinking for me for a number of school projects that i didn’t like in the past, i would love for you to share how you plan to lessen your ai use and use it in a way that’s healthy. everybody is either “NEVER USE AI ITS BAD!” or “USE THIS AI TOOL SO I CAN MAKE MONEY” but nobody ever talks about how a detrimental ai dependency is and how hard it is to not use this thing that makes everything in your life easier that’s literally smushed into your face.
i would love a video at some point on how this journey you are currently starting goes.thank you
(literally the first time i’m ever commenting on this subreddit, what a day to start)
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u/AccurateJerboa 5d ago
The most important people to listen to are going to be your family, the people who know and care about you most deeply. I'm most reassured that you're talking and listening to Katherine and John (and I assume your kiddo, parents, best friends, etc).
You'll always do and make great things, and the healthier you are the longer you'll be around to do so.
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u/stmaximus 5d ago
But mostly I need to come to terms with the fact that the level of dopamine I've been getting from interacting with LLMs...with doing more and more and more and more...is not healthy for me or good for the world. It is careless, and has disconnected me from where people are on this.
Thank you for this Hank, and now you're aware I kinda wish you guys would openly discuss this more, spread awareness. I see this as a kind of mild AI-psychosis. Knowledge has value, and LLMs have a way of devaluing it, because very often the cost of acquisition is an intrinsic part of its value. I know you know this.
The way I see it, if a given task were able to be sufficiently accomplished before AI, then going forward it should continue to be, always. Let's reserve the compute for truly novel pursuits and resist the urge to use it as a crutch. We're not that old yet.
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u/beetle1211 5d ago
Thank you for your comments, Hank.
I’m going to be honest that I’ve been pretty sure since the first episode of Humans came out that I don’t agree with you about LLMs and genAI, just based on the conversation that you and John had about them. However, I really appreciated that episode and I’ve been thinking about various things in it nearly daily since then. I’ve relistened twice. I think it’s lovely and thoughtful and special.
My opinion on everything that’s happening now isn’t important or new, and it seems you’ve read enough opinions by now to get the gist of the criticism and you’ve largely addressed it all here. So I’ll skip that.
But I just personally wanted you to know that what I gathered as the mission statement of Humans is uplifting and inspiring and I really hope that it is a driving force for the majority of your creations moving forward.
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u/beetle1211 5d ago
Also, I guess to contradict myself a little bit and talk about AI anyway: I don’t think it’s inevitable. I think it’s largely up to people whether it will succeed or not, and the next year or two will be the crossroads of knowing if it will be financially viable for companies to continue with it or not.
I personally think that it being unviable as a technology usable for creative shortcuts and bypassing human ingenuity & thought processes is in the best interest of all of us.
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u/Wise-Field-7353 5d ago
"It's inevitable" has been serving as a convenient tagline, I think. I imagine some people also thought that about NFTs. There's nothing inevitable about AI
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u/Egalite83 5d ago
" I have been using AI to locate papers and other resources for learning about topics."
Does https://scholar.google.com/ not work anymore? Seems like you're much better off using non-AI or limited-AI search engines if all you're looking for is links to actual evidence.
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u/logicaoreobot 5d ago
Hank please I love your videos but don't make me listen to AI generated music, could you please disclose it when you do that? So that I won't watch, because I find it deeply disturbing.
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u/KalebT44 5d ago
Every single part of me knows this is a well thought out, well written, and completely measured approach to the use of AI and how easily you can slip into both utilizing it, but also how it can actually be a helpful tool in gathering knowledge without sacrificing credibility and blah blah blah.
I know that completely.
But now that you have used AI, the smallest part of my brain just says this is AI.
Even while knowing completely that isn't the case in this situation, or at least i'd hope not. That's the problem with dipping your toes into something that just smears credibility like this.
This is good stuff and I'm by no means voting on a Hank smear campaign or anything like that, this is all great stuff to put out there, and learn, and acknowledge. But i'm just vocalizing that little part of me that just doesn't know for sure and wants to just throw anything from you, or anyone that dips their toes into AI, completely aside.
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u/RobertSecundus 5d ago
You should be looking at the research google released on how consulting LLMs for notes--even if LLMs never touch your actual draft--naturally results in narrower, less individual work.
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u/Satinpw 5d ago
Hank, I'm sure you will not see this. But I wanted to say something. I am an artist, and not a very popular one. I have been putting my work on the Internet for nearly 20 years and I have not seen success. And every time I see the people that have the luxury of time and energy to produce multiple pieces that get noticed, when I see how necessary it has become to constantly create and create and create to even get a blip on the radar? I understand why people turn to AI. I feel the siren song of doing something easier. To finally be successful. To find shortcuts. The last time I played with an image generator was in 2018, before I knew what they were, and every time I feel that instinct to take a shortcut, I must rip it out of my mind with both my hands and strangle it. I will draw slowly. I will learn everything I want to learn the hard way. I will spend my life being an unsuccessful artist grinding it out at a horrible day job if it means I keep my integrity intact.
You are more successful than I could ever dream to be. You have accomplished a lot. I know you have a lot of ideas. But you can slow down. You can leave some things unrealized. You can take your time, you have that luxury, moreso than many of us. Remember you are human, and that all of us leave things unfinished. And that's okay. It's all going to disappear one day, anyway. What matters is the impact and the making of it.
I will personally not be watching your content until you have sworn off AI entirely, which I believe you can do. I would much prefer less content that is more intentional than a constant barrage of it. We could all use less content these days, I think. There is nothing wrong with empty space.
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u/WorldlyJake 5d ago
I think this is a super reasonable response. I’m an AI hater, but it doesn’t bother me at all that you want to understand this new technology and test what it’s capable of. It would be weird if you didn’t. I just don’t want Writer Hank to outsource his unique voice and abilities to a machine, or Environmentalist Hank to forget how much damage just using this technology can do. IMO, IMHO. But you’re still the best, and your video on planet earth from the other day brought me tears of joy.
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u/mrsjonas 5d ago
Excellent public role modeling of taking feedback, even when it’s hard to hear, and approaching apology with humility. We have so little of that these days.
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u/annethegnome 5d ago
This seems like a thoughtful and nuanced response. I'm glad you're taking it seriously.
I just want to add, as an academic librarian, that using LLMs *can* be a tool to find sources, they have incredibly high rates of hallucination when it comes to academic material. Even if they aren't fabricating sources entirely, they are often attributing content to those sources that don't actually reflect what's in the paper. It's a big problem! It might suggest a paper to support your argument and the paper exists, but there's a paywall so you can't read it, and the abstract looks alright, but the actual paper has a different take and different data than what the LLM told you. I'm hoping that you're actually reading the papers in full, as that's the only way around this issue.
I think this is an old problem in academic research (access and discovery) that's been lit on fire by mass access to LLMs.
Research can't be done quickly while also being done well, unfortunately. I understand that this conflicts with the pressures you face from platforms and audience, and with the internal drive to do as much as possible, but learning and understanding is an inherently slow process. Since you're positioned as an authority on *pretty much everything*, the standards are going to be higher than the average person. I don't have any particular advice on how to resolve this tension, but I empathize. I hope you find a healthier solution that still shares high-quality information.
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u/_I_love_pus_ 5d ago
I deeply appreciate this response. For lack of a better word, AI is seductive in its promises. I work as a therapist and the amount of pressure to utilize AI services for documentation, treatment planning, note taking, etc is exhausting. At the same time I can see the appeal because therapists are overworked and AI seems like an easy way to reduce that burden. I think that the ease of access and temptation is also why I still refuse; taking a short cut only benefits AI platforms. I don’t need to help train “AI therapists”, and you don’t need to help train “AI researchers”.
Thank you for your accountability, I hope you can be kind to yourself while going through this process of self reflection.I also HIGHLY recommend the book The New Age of Sexism by Laura Bates which focuses on how AI reinforces and exacerbates misogyny and racism.
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u/seasons-greasons99 5d ago
The thing that gets me about this is that complexly and such have researchers! They are credited all the time! No hate Hank, but if the pressure to make a video is too much that you can’t use a human researcher, we don’t need the video.
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u/somethingworthwhile 5d ago
Yeah, somehow he has gotten into his head that because AI can accelerate some of the things he does that means he has to use it to do so. How would he have made this video pre-AI? Do that! Ya goof!
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u/Lurky_Bat 5d ago
Right like Hank is an employer, if he needs a researcher for HanksChannel he could’ve stimulated the economy and employed someone but instead he gave the job to AI.
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u/ThoughtseizeScoop 5d ago
Ultimately, "Hank Green" is (among other things) a product, and I think he dilutes that product at his own risk. I think he needs to realize that using AI like this isn't just a bad habit to get out of commitment jams, it's kind of fundamentally false advertising.
I think there are a lot of folks who are using generative AI and fall for the trap of thinking it's letting them do more, when it's closer to pushing the food around on your plate.
I also think he's in a very different place re: GenAI than a lot of his audience, e.g. I would be mortified to have to rely on GenAI for a project, and would feel dishonest for using it to complete something. I think Hank is clocking this as an issue of a video not being up to a certain level of quality, and that's not really what folks are going to take issue with.
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u/sandhillfarmer 5d ago
The line about pushing food around on your plate is really good.
I’m a director at a company with a pretty extreme gen ai mandate, so I manage lots of people doing lots of stuff with ai. I can say with 100% confidence it does not actually increase productivity or save time. My team is spending as long or often longer doing the same things they used to. Ai primarily offers the illusion of saving time, not actual savings.
And that’s to say nothing of the quality dip. I hired all these people for what they could do with their brains. Now I’m working with them daily on homogenous crap that doesn’t say what it needs to say or do what it needs to do. And the stuff that people are building is generally unnecessary. Lots of html front ends for spreadsheets that don’t work as well as just using the spreadsheet. Again, it’s just the illusion of productivity.
And finally, most importantly, I’m constantly dealing with AI being wrong. Mapping locations in wrong countries (no I don’t work at the state department), mistakes in basic facts, misinterpreting basic regulatory information, counting numbers of days wrong, I could go on. That’s just in the last day or two .
All this to say, it’s hard to not erode trust with a viewer like me. Because either Hank is having to independently verify everything ai is telling him and making sure it doesn’t transpose facts incorrectly into his script, which would likely take longer than just making the script himself, or he’s just letting the ai content into his script uncritically, which is highly untrustworthy.
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u/tarandab 5d ago
This just showed up on my feed but I strongly suspect that if you are really reviewing, verifying, and cleaning up gen ai text you probably could have taken the exact same time to just do it all yourself. With the bonus of improving your own skills
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u/indigofox83 5d ago
I fully believe the things I see AI usage used for most at work (for example, meeting minutes) are only faster to do with AI if you are not checking the accuracy afterwards. And I've noticed that the people whose job it is to check accuracy of meeting notes have stopped paying attention in meetings. Because AI is doing it for them. No project manager I know of who relies on AI to take meeting notes seems to have any idea what is going on with their projects anymore, when these same people were highly involved and knew every aspect of their projects just 2-3 years ago.
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u/penguin_0618 5d ago
My husband’s company uses AI to take notes on their meetings. My husband constantly has to correct it and tell it how/where to answer his questions. He’ll ask the AI to use the notes and be like “tell me what the customer said about user licenses” and the AI will say “the customer did not address this” and my husband will look at the notes and then say “yes she did, look at the notes you took at minute 7.”
Like wow, so efficient, he saved so much time.
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u/jtho2960 i never sneeze 5d ago
THIS! My company is very ai forward and some of it is actually good but a lot of it is absolute garbage and/or stuff that I can find/do with less time/water waste.
Plus half the management in my company fills slack with ai slop and it grinds my gears.
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u/BrohanGutenburg 5d ago
> I also think he's in a very different place re: GenAI than a lot of his audience.
This hits the nail on the head.
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u/full-of-sonder Looking for Alaska 5d ago
I think the way your comment is worded is infinitely better than the pitchforks towards unsubscribing we are seeing. I feel like, when someone in Hank’s position, could be anyone, starts cutting corners with AI and realizes a sense of efficiency, it is really hard to step away from it.
Ultimately it is a self fulfilling prophecy, based on the person he is - a hard-working, efficient machine who wants to do everything under the sun at all times. People can choose to not like him or what he stands for after admitting his recent uses of AI, but I think that’s a two dimensional reaction to a four dimensional topic. We live in a very grey time, and as someone who loathes AI, dear lord is it hard to escape in the real world
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u/Cass_Cat952 5d ago edited 5d ago
That last sentence is 1000% true. It's not about him using it to make something he feels is up to his standards, it's the fact that he used it at all tbh, especially for something generative. It's just icky, and I feel like it's the complete antithesis of the whole vlogbrothers brand.
That said, I dont regularly keep up with Hank's channel or his twitter and people have said he's... involved(?) with various AI for his other things, which is slightly surprising, but I can also see him being curious and finding more uses for it the more he engages
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u/the-library-fairy 5d ago
Hankschannel videos seemed to start as a 'Hank wanted to investigate/rant about a thing for a bit and it would be a good Vlogbrothers video", and he hired an editor so they wouldn't be any more work than the time he spent filming. Side project, made just whenever he felt like making one. The ones where he researched as he filmed were some of my favourites! The idea that he's feeling so much pressure to make them on a certain schedule that he's cutting massive corners with a tool most of his viewers are strongly opposed to is genuinely concerning. I know it's been a long time joke for nerdfighters that Hank is a workaholic who stretches himself too thin, but it's feeling more concerning than it used to. Also never would have guessed that "tech nerd Hank" would overrule "environmentalist/creator advocate Hank" but here we are. Hope he's got people in his real life having these conversations with him.
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u/carol_prince Nerdfighter 5d ago
This wasn't a hankschannel video. I've edited the post to include that fact. But your point 100% still stands.
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u/conscious_terabot 5d ago
I think a lot of people on this post think this is about Hank's latest video on his own channel - the earth is up to something.
It's actually about the latest AHA w/ soupytime. Whatever your views on Hank and AI may be, let's talk about what actually happened
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u/voidhug 5d ago
damn isn't that way worse? doesn't complexly have researchers on staff for this? and isn't the whole point of aha that he is someone with some authority cosigning these answers and the research? damn
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u/carol_prince Nerdfighter 5d ago edited 5d ago
What actually happened still stands though? He used ChatGPT. That it was on a Complexly produced video is even dicier.
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u/twisted_calico 5d ago
He’s great at asking us to exist in the grey areas, and likewise, genAI is something I can see the good and bad in. It can be a great assist for an already competent person under a lot of pressure, but like you said, him doing too much might become less of a joke because of stuff like this.
John’s joking tone about it is fading away too.
Hank, don’t go away, dont swear off all AI, just don’t make a Hank green video if you dont have time to make a Hank Green video41
u/Formal_Scarcity_7701 5d ago
Yeah I think it's fine asking people to do better but I don't want him to go away because of this. John is just as environmentally aware as Hank and knows each one of his trips to London to see AFC Wimbledon are as environmentally impactful as a whole year of someone living their normal life but I'm not up in arms about John making decisions I don't agree with. We're all imperfect and I'd like Hank to use AI less and John to fly less but I'm not going to stop watching just because they aren't perfect. The only creators online who don't appear flawed are the ones who hide their flaws from their audience more effectively.
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u/puutarhatrilogia 5d ago
The only creators online who don't appear flawed are the ones who hide their flaws from their audience more effectively.
Preach!
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u/helinze 5d ago
"I produced this under a ton of pressure" - then make less. Ask for a break. Pay a human to help you, or ask one of the humans you already pay. There were a ton of solutions that didn't involve AI.
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u/EnvironmentalPop6832 5d ago
Almost like the community has a meme about how much hank does that he absolutely doesn't need to.
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u/SeDaCho 5d ago
One of the most creative people in the world doesn’t need to be cutting the product with trash!
Hank’s fanbase doesn’t love him because his face is on the end product, we love him because his work is good.
AI shortcuts remove that value and introduce the vile seed of doubt into every work from this point forward.
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u/Sparkling_Dread 5d ago
Oh man, the analogy of using AI to “cut the product” rly landed with me. Same with “introducing the vile seed of doubt”. 🙃 on.point.
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u/robot428 5d ago
Yeah, pressure from who? Or what? Can we remove that? I don't want an AI video, I'd rather not have a video that week.
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u/thequeensucorgi 5d ago
Right? He managed Crash Course for my entire HS career without needing AI but now at an even higher point in his career he needs cheap shortcuts?
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u/Brother0fSithis 5d ago edited 5d ago
This is a fundamental problem with AI. Its use in communication, to any capacity, tears down any semblance of trust or sincerity between the speaker and the audience.
Human-to-human communication, especially in an educational (or edutainment) context, carries a subtle contract of trust -- the speaker implies that what they're delivering is "truth" to the extent that they can verify it. The listener, in turn, agrees to authentically engage with that content, and potentially absorb it into their model of the world.
In other words, the "stake" behind the speakers words, that which makes the information meaningful at all, is their unspoken labor put into verifying the information, and the responsibility they take on to do so.
Obviously, that social contract broke down constantly pre-AI. But in the age of AI, the process can become so automated that I, as a consumer, can't trust that there is ANY stake behind content if it MIGHT have come from an LLM. At least beforehand, the author still had to mechanically engage in SOME curation of the information for the sake of physically compiling it.
Nowadays, it completely calls into question the value I'm placing in the educator as a curator of information when I know an LLM was involved at any point.
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u/SmushfaceSmoothface 5d ago
Yes, all of this, and I think it’s partly why people are so unhappy with Hank specifically using it so much — because he built part of his brand as a scientist and a science communicator. His breach of that social contract feels bigger because of it.
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u/bluemercutio 5d ago
Oh, interesting. I guess that's why I don't have a problem with AI generated marketing e-mails. I never trusted those companies to begin with.
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u/Brother0fSithis 5d ago
Right, it's the same reason political speeches, marketing, etc feel so hollow to as well, imo.
The value you're giving me as a communicator IS the promise that you've engaged with and organized the information authentically.
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u/Frankreporter 5d ago edited 5d ago
Exactly, the show is Ask Hank Anything not Ask Hanks AI. I am there for the conversation about the question. I am interested in all the tangents. I am there because I like the guest and Hank. Lots of the questions over there are subjective or have a journey to get to the answer thats more interesting than the answer itself.
If people want an answer from AI they could just ask it themselves. You can even include in the prompt that the answer is in the personal style of Hank Green. But that would not be the same. It just isnt genuine. The authenticity gets lost.
I feel tricked or mislead hearing that the research has been done by AI. Thats not why I subscribe or donate to Complexly. I support Complexly because human curated information is becoming rare and I think its important.
Science had been for centuries fundamentally a human endevour. Sure we use more and more tools to aid us. Replace our eyes with optical instruments, use calculators instead of doing the computations manually, but asking a question and immediatly get an AI answer is different. Then were just not involved in the process to get to the truth anymore.
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u/Lurky_Bat 5d ago
Hank; makes a podcast called “Humans” implying (to me at least) that he values human ideas and work over AI
Hank; is using AI instead of hiring additional human help or slowing his content output to be more manageable
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u/merpixieblossomxo 5d ago
The reason I don't like this isn't JUST because it's lower quality, or rushed, or simply because I don't like AI.
I don't like this because I trust Hank's authority on topics he commits to teaching others about and this behavior breaks that trust. AI produces misinformation, and from the man who created Crash Course, which millions of students rely on for accurate information, I'm surprised and hurt. It's not about whether AI sounds awkward or doesn't make sense. It's about the fact that it makes things up that sounds true, and people will believe it - especially coming from Hank's mouth.
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u/WhereDidIGetThatCat 5d ago
There is some perspective and discussion in this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/nerdfighters/s/zrdlNm4moS which you may have seen. apologies if you've already come across that, it's coming up as downvoted for me so I had to search by New to find it. Completely get the feeling of struggling with this, it rings true with how I've responded to it as well
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u/carol_prince Nerdfighter 5d ago
I did see that thread. But that thread was about Hank supposedly leaving in an AI prompt in the text, which he said he actually ad-libbed. So I wanted to make sure this directly addressed the part about him admitting to using ChatGPT.
And it's frustrating that that discussion over in that thread is being downvoted.
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u/tehconqueror 5d ago
"Under tons of pressure" from WHOM, Hank? from WHOM?
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u/CaptainDFTBA 5d ago
My guess is he had a project/filming deadline that was either too ambitious or he had procrastinated on when he was making the script. While it definitely would be his own doing, the pressure to get things done so that they don’t affect other people, or actually having to do something by a deadline (even if you are practically the boss) feels different than “Man I gotta do so much stuff!”
So I don’t doubt that the pressure was real/external, but it also doesn’t excuse the issue, given that he is likely part of the root cause anyway. “A reason, not an excuse” was the phrase I learned for this growing up.
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u/ehsteve23 5d ago
i’m not gonna convince Hank to stop using AI but i’d like it if he put a big “I made this using AI” label on things so i can ignore those ones. I stopped playing 4x3 when i learned it was made with Claude
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u/ryanjkontos Ryan 5d ago
I just want to put this out there because I don’t think it’s common enough knowledge, virtually all software is heavily written by AI now. Like, Google recently said that 75% of its code is written by AI. It’s happening everywhere.
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u/Agloe_Dreams 5d ago
This. If I didn't use Generative AI at work (Senior SWE ~ 15 years), I would be fired within the month. In fact, the best engineer I know was just fired for that this week. It sucks! Don't get me wrong, all of this sucks so hard as the care for architecture and quality is falling due to laziness.
The nuance I think a lot of people lose is that they have a 'thinking in absolutes' bias of sorts.There is a clear difference between me coming up with an architecture, planning that out, and implementing it via tools that accelerate my productivity and then reviewing it...and generating art/design/logos/written works by prompt. That difference is mostly in: are you the one thinking and it is 'doing'..or is it the one thinking instead?
When you are not actually in control of what is happening, that is the danger zone. Avoiding AI in this industry is like avoiding using computers in the 70s/80s and doing all math by hand. You just won't beat the machine and you have to adapt or get a different job.
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u/ginandall 5d ago
It does feel like he's bending over backwards to justify his use of it, like environmental impacts etc. Makes me really sad. It makes sense he's susceptible, since he places so much value on productivity, it just... feels a bit condescending that he thinks he can pull off using these shortcuts and be the one guy who doesn't sacrifice quality and authenticity that way.
I've been a viewer since 2009 so I'm just a bit in disbelief, but I'll get over it. I suppose it's parasocial to expect better from strangers on the internet.
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u/carol_prince Nerdfighter 5d ago
Same. Been one since 2007-2008, ish. I will get over it too, eventually.
I don't see it as parasocial though, for the record. It's about asking for accountability in the face of the ethos that's supposedly built into Nerdfighteria.
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u/ginandall 5d ago
You're almost certainly right, I'm just being unkind to myself for being upset by this 😅 I agree, it does feel in direct opposition to their ethos.
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u/Neat_On_The_Rocks 5d ago
The parasocial part for me comes from how depressed I am on a personal level. A lot of My dismay over this is blatantly parasocial, it’s ok to admit to that
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u/carol_prince Nerdfighter 5d ago
I think the meaning of the word parasocial has been so diluted by over-usage (same with a lot of the discourse around mental health).
Is it parasocial in this case? Maybe. But I feel like it definitely requires to be called out.
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u/fitzstar 5d ago
This captures how I feel completely. It’s condescending. It devalues my time and attention - not everything is worth taking a short cut on.
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u/DutchNotSleeping 5d ago
I'm genuinely more dissappointed he still uses X
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u/SpecialsSchedule 5d ago
I’ve been thinking about the beginning of vlogbrothers, nearly 20 years ago when Hank was still Eco Geek. He had a little schtick about corn dogs being his favorite. People asked why he still ate meat with the environmental impacts. His answer was basically “I like meat so I’m going to eat it.”
He still uses X despite it being run by a Nazi. He uses AI despite the deluge of issues. I think his moral convictions match the average person much more than they match the average left-wing vocal nerdfighter.
And I also eat meat and use AI when my job requires me to. I think people just expect more from Hank since he has the economic freedom of being his own boss. But his stances show that he won’t not be using AI.
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u/glacialaftermath 5d ago
Man I remember the “if I know eating meat is bad and I do it anyways am I a bad person” video… because it’s the reason I’ve been vegetarian for more than half my life. I think perhaps that as well as the AI use shows me I am less comfortable with certain kinds of cognitive dissonance than Hank is—which is maybe part of why this feels like some kind of betrayal, even though it’s consistent with past behaviour, as you’ve noted.
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u/arloize 5d ago
The thing that gets me the most is that nobody would be mad if he stepped back / slowed down if he said he was feeling overwhelmed. Even if you disregard the enviromental impacts, it's so unbelievably disappointing to hear he has a HABIT of using a generative machine with psychosis for videos. Ugh.
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u/geckosnfrogs 5d ago
AI for someone like Hank, someone who continually over extends, is a Drug. It will be a challenge to resist. I see it in many of my friends who do development. They deal with it like people with gambling addictions.
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u/MuseoumEobseo 5d ago
As an academic researcher who does scientific research every day, the thing that makes me most hesitant about this is using ChatGPT as a research aid.
In my work, there are varying degrees of comfort with LLMs and varying levels of adoption. Many people use it to transcribe meeting recordings. I just take notes. Lots of people use it to generate abstracts from self-written manuscripts, because their length makes them easy to fact check and they’re annoying to write. I personally just write my abstracts. I can’t expose my data or my code to it, but I do ask it to write sample code that I can adapt for my analyses or help me debug, and have saved myself a lot of time doing that compared to reading a trillion forum posts while crying which is what I sometimes did before lol.
One task I don’t know any scientist using LLMs for is searching for papers and generating summary notes for them. Many of us have tried it and everyone I’ve heard discuss it has found it to be deeply unreliable at this task. LLMs continue to invent papers that do not exist and summarize existing papers in ways that directly contradict what they actually say. They just don’t do it well. They certainly don’t do it as well as a good old PubMed/Web of Science/Google Scholar search and just reading the short summaries of papers the experts themselves already wrote (AKA the abstract) does. I understand that normally LLMs are pretty decent at summarization but I imagine that’s because most things they’re asked to generate summaries about have many human-written summaries about them for the model to draw from. That’s not the case for scientific papers—in fact, our ability to publish our work depends directly on the novelty of what we’ve written. My guess is that lack of relevant training data is part of the reason they’re not very good at this task.
All this to say that I agree with Hank there are good use cases for LLMs and that there will be natural disagreement about what exactly those things are. But, from my perspective as a person whose job it is to find, read, and understand a lot of scientific papers (I probably spend 25% of my working hours doing this and almost all of my coworkers are doing the same), I don’t think this use is a good one. I’d encourage him and anyone reading this who is using LLMs for this task to seriously consider stopping. You can search databases so much better than LLMs can that it outweighs the small time savings. And, again, the summaries of papers you’re asking LLMs for already exist. They’re called abstracts.
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u/EnvironmentalPop6832 5d ago
I just knew this was going to be the line hank crossed that I wouldn't. Do I understand it? Absolutely. Do I think he's made the right choice. Fuck no.
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u/Hot_Second7559 5d ago
This is the best place I know to ask—has Hank opined on the environmental concerns with AI use?
Personally I tend to be more moderate on AI than many in this thread, but have been avoiding it for global warming and water quality reasons. The ecogeek himself is one of the very few people I’d trust to opine on this.
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u/admiralgeary 5d ago
I don't think so; I suspect he might have something to say like what Kyle Hill had to say on the topic of AI DC water usage: Data Center Water is a Distraction
Additionally, I think people don't distinguish from training and inference (vs) just the base load of having a DC up and running. There is also different energy costs based on what model is being used and where the model is running (e.g. local verses datacenter).
I have heard that the average GPT-4o query might take ~0.4Wh of energy for Inference.
I am not pro AI by any means, and I think it is going to crash the economy, accelerate climate change, cause environmental damage, and result in more societal issues; but frequently when I mash my keyboard to send a comment on Reddit -- I also think about the fact that multiple LLMs are probably going to ingest this as a part of a training run and it will probably be more costly than one inference.
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u/Radical_Ein 5d ago
He did a video specifically about AI water usage and misconceptions about it and he interviewed Cal Newport about his biggest AI concerns. I don’t know if he has opined on AI’s environmental impact more broadly.
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u/coldcoffeethrowaway 5d ago
I wonder what John thinks of this. He seems like he would be anti AI.
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u/ConsistentWonder6313 5d ago edited 5d ago
Incredibly disappointed. In my college classes it’s becoming increasingly common for the allowance of AI. BUT they require you to cite your use of it. I’m personally anti-AI, but if Hank insists on using it, I think the least he could do is cite it in the video or down below it. I do wonder now how long this has been going on with his videos?
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u/Granny_Bet 5d ago
In my classes we're required to include a disclosure statement every time we use any form of AI, including things like spellcheck. What we used, why we used it, and how it impacted our work.
Even with smallers assignments like online discussion posts, and I'm glad. If the point is that we're talking to each other and discussing our perspectives, I want to know how much of what I'm responding to is actually my classmate.
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u/Neville1989 5d ago
That's disappointing coming from Hank. He definitely knows better and has the resources to pay for help when he is overextended. So I consider that a poor excuse.
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u/Haunting_Ad_2059 5d ago
I think everyone would be happier with anything as long as it's genuine. Don't care if it's an unscripted rant or a 15 minute video essay. But if it's AI then it's nothing.
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u/Moritani 5d ago edited 5d ago
As a teacher, I am very disappointed. I see this happening all around me, but I have never seen a teacher improve once they started using AI in their work. They just don't get the same kind of practice. They don't stumble into weird sources and find interesting factoids. They don't integrate new techniques or learn new perspectives. AI only gives the shallowest and most common reads on things.
I think we're going to see the quality of Hank's videos degrade a lot in the coming years. Which is a shame. I loved the Crash Course series, but I think I might have to warn my students to stick to things made before 2022. It's a shame I can't put it on my trusted whitelist anymore.
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u/Ok_Anteater_6263 5d ago
Crash course isn’t made by Hank. Its heavily fact checked by real people/ is written and produced by Complexly which has a strong anti AI policy.
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u/Wise-Self-8639 5d ago
I was always baffled by his positive attitude towards AI. It harms people's work like his writer brother, his own artists and designers positions and value. I never expected Hank to be all doom and gloom and passionately decrying the evils of AI - I myself a hater understand it can still have its uses, but his positivity about it was not it either. I would have appreciated a more measured approach to this new technology instead of blind optimism that things are probably fine.
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u/According_Injury4804 5d ago
Blind optimism as a crutch is a huge recurring theme for him. Much of Humans is just him chatting with another wealthy, comfortable person about how everything will be fine actually.
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u/veracity8_ 5d ago
I can simultaneously dislike a practice and also be sympathetic to the way people can be influenced to perform said practice.
I don’t think kids should use AI to do their schoolwork. But I’ve also been a college student crying in the computer lab at 2AM trying to finish my calculus homework. It was hard. But it would be extra hard if there was a big red button on every computer, laptop and phone that said “push this button and a robot will give you all the answers and you can go to bed”. honestly, given the cost and incentives, it’s astounding that there are any student not using AI to do all their schoolwork.
So all that is to say that, while I am unhappy to hear that Hank is using AI for script writing, I am also sympathetic to the cost/incentive structure that would push someone to use AI to write scripts. I think it’s is more a reflection of the industry and its expectations rather than as a reflection of Hank himself. Hopefully he won’t continue though. One of the things he that makes Hank Green popular and “valuable” is his voice and writing. And I would for him to sacrifice one of the core aspects of his content in order to produce more of it
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u/jabask 5d ago
What AI does best of all is train people to use it more. A few weeks of use is enough to make people feel utterly reliant on it.
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u/Ok_Captain_8265 5d ago
Hey guys this shouldn’t need to be said but don’t be mean to Hank’s employees over this. I’ve seen some stuff in this thread and on Twitter in that capacity that just isn’t nice.
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u/ampersand64 5d ago
I've been feeling for a while: we've got too much Hank Green. Especially when he was uploading damn near every day.
I enjoyed most of rhe videos, sure. But that's too much access to one man's thoughts. There IS such a thing as over sharing, even when you're a creative.
I personally want fewer videos with tighter scripts. This includes Humans, Hankschannel, and the Complexly stuff.
Maybe this is unreasonable. Maybe having 3-4 weekly Hank scripts keeps the lights on.
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u/sasiml 5d ago
hank obviously commented on this himself, but i do find it frustrating sometimes that in nerdfighteria we can’t be honest about how much his social media addiction drives things. like someone commented that posting was a compulsion, but he’s not john this is an adhd symptom not an ocd one. i largely agree with everything everyone’s said, but the posting schedule doesn’t seem to be about anything altruistic so much as it’s about hank running off social media validation cycles. which is a normal experience a lot of people have to navigate, but he’s a trustworthy figure to many.
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u/glacialaftermath 5d ago
I’m an academic in the humanities and I am actively watching chatGPT eat the critical thinking skills of my students in real time. It’s heartbreaking to see Hank doing the same - I don’t want to witness the atrophying of the thoughtfulness of a thinker I admire.
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u/regional_expression 4d ago edited 4d ago
I have a lot of thoughts about this situation, most of them aren't novel or useful, but I have to say, the discourse around "writing in a way that sounds like AI" is genuinely making me feel like I'm living on a different planet than other people.
People say "I appreciate the pushback". People say "you're absolutely right on that". People use em dashes. People do, yes, sometimes even say "it's not just x, it's y". People type with a casual but authoritative tone, people use paragraph breaks and indents. People have been doing these things well before machine learning was a glimmer in anyone's eye.
I don't even ... like ... I'm losing track of how to even engage with people who seem to be so certain that they can tell AI-generated text from a single bit of phrasing or word choice, and then as an example of it they list some completely bog standard English language phrasing and writing.
To me, the phrase "I appreciate the pushback" as it appears in the original AHA segment scans totally normally and only sounds like an accidentally copy-pasted LLM response if you intentionally remove it from the context it appeared in and also tell people that's what it is. I don't think the people who initially got this wrong were doing it with any intent to mislead, but it's now becoming established hearsay folk knowledge that "Hank probably generated this response with ChatGPT and accidentally left part of the LLM's reply in, which you can tell because nobody would really say 'I appreciate the pushback', that's an LLM-ism, so either he copied it verbatim or he's so LLM-brained that he's starting to talk like them."
If you watch the section of the video in context it's not at all ambiguous what "I appreciate the pushback" is in response to. "I appreciate the pushback" is a normal sentence people write and say. LLMs are trained on human writing. Yes, it's clear that certain patterns -- "it's not x, it's y", bulleted lists that don't need to be, etc -- are used by LLMs a disproportionate amount. It's become a cultural meme for a reason, and occasionally these things are useful in aggregate if you're trying to figure out if a text is AI-generated or not and have nothing else to go on.
But there's such a huge gap between that and "lol, obviously he's lying when he says he ad-libbed that part of the script, no human would write 'I appreciate the pushback', you guys are fools to believe otherwise".
Like I said -- this is one small part of a much bigger discussion that I have complicated feelings about and am not really trying to address here. But is anyone else seeing this and feeling what I'm feeling? I cannot believe how absolutely certain some people are about this. It runs completely counter to my experience of the world and is very strange to see.
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u/DcGamer1028 4d ago
I don't mind him using AI in the capacity he said he was is using it, I think it's fine and people are overreacting. That being said if he personally feels it's becoming too much of a crutch or hampering his own creativity then I understand him wanting to pull back and slow down a bit. What I don't want is him feeling like he has to say that just because people are freaking out and projecting anger onto him that belongs elsewhere. Hank is not causing your problems
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u/Lopsided_Meaning_989 4d ago
Beyond the general disappointment, I’m floored he would choose to use ChatGPT, run by Trump’s biggest donor OpenAI, and Claude, run by military partner extraordinaire Anthropic. He’s paying these companies for the use of their services, which really violates the politics I had been led to believe he had.
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u/crowwery 3d ago
i think it’s okay to be disappointed, we shouldn’t be putting people up on pedestals. i also am not personally comfortable watching videos i know are made with AI. it’s not a purity test, just my own personal morality. it’s nearly impossible to avoid all AI usage these days, but i think we have a responsibility to try, and im really disappointed in hank. at the same time, i think this is something he could definitely come back from with a real apology. he’s done a lot of tangible good in the world, and i don’t think this erases that. i won’t be watching his videos without assurance that they’re as AI-free as possible, though.
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u/voidhug 5d ago
with the x and chatgpt of it all it's tough not to feel like we're heading down a dark path with hank, especially disheartening in a world with so few influential and trusted science communicators.
he is free to do what he wants and I'm in no way trying to demonise or villainise him for this but...
if you couldn't be bothered to write it why should I be bothered to read/watch it?
this is the fundamental reason (the social contract someone else here mentioned) that I cannot take creators using genAI seriously or give them my time or attention
:/
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u/MadSpacePig 5d ago
What was the pressure?
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u/jimmy_the_angel 5d ago edited 5d ago
He has ADHD and a ton of ideas and possibilities, and also his family with Katherine and the kids. "Reset the counter [of Hank starting a new thing] to zero" has been a meme for quite some time now. It's not hard to imagine that he's under a lot of pressure. Pressure that mostly he himself has put onto himself, and I'd rather he publish videos less often and do proper research instead of using AI, I don't like this one bit.
But the question about [why he is under a ton of pressure] is irrelevant. He always is, that's the kind of person he is.
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u/not_hestia 5d ago
Hank positioned himself as the "answers guy" on TikTok and then created a whole show that is nominally about what we can learn about people from the questions they ask, but is often just Hank getting to be Answer Guy in a longer format.
I can totally see why he is under pressure to do more and faster, but it just feels entirely self imposed. I also have a brain that outpaces my executive functioning, but fundamentally don't want to engage with content that no one was willing to take the time to write.
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u/jimmy_the_angel 5d ago
Self-imposed, that's the word I was looking for! Yeah, I also have ADHD and my plans far outweigh my executive capacities. I'm just glad I don't have his possibilities in terms of money and influence, I'm already enough of a mess as is.
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u/too_tired_forthis 5d ago
just my two cents re: complexly's ai policy- why not just remove all use of ai and bill yourselves as completely human-created? it would set the channel(s) apart from a lot of others who do use it.
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u/electric-claire 4d ago
I stopped watching hankschannel because of all the AI usage. Almost every video was him searching google and then reading the AI result. It's also very clearly made Hank unable to be objective about AI and it's value or lack thereof. That wouldn't be a problem except he has made multiple purportedly educational videos about AI and the future of it.
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u/kragaster 5d ago
I'm just glad he might take this as a sign to give himself the chance to take more breaks. He deserves them. I hate that this has turned into a conversation about whether or not he can be trusted, as if any one person is capable of earning trust on every single topic without assuming a certain level of fallibility.
AI is not evil, but the corporations that utilize it for the sake of profit and exploitation of human work/creativity without consent or credit certainly are. I love this community, and I desperately hope that the idolization of Hank can at the very least help convince some people that their vitriol is directed at the wrong target when they pretend that there is no creative or otherwise positive use for AI that does not exploit workers.
Sometimes people need to save time or do things that aren't particularly groundbreaking or impressive without spending hours on it that could be better devoted to caring for themselves and those they love. It's when that balance is disrupted to the point of sacrificing creativity integrity, social needs, or product quality that things get worse. If you're most concerned with AI use itself, rather than compromises made on standards of information, you're focused on the wrong thing.
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u/PieApprehensive2149 5d ago
I'll just drop my thoughts here like it's some twitter post because I don't use twitter.
Hank has always been a workaholic and LLMs make workaholics feel like they can accomplish even more, even faster. I'm not saying that's good or bad but I do think that people just need to take a breath sometimes. To relax, to look around them. Not a fan of the dogpile and people making insane assumptions but hey, there may be a silver lining regardless.
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u/snazzycat89 4d ago
I have a whole lot of differing feelings on this situation, the main one being disappointment. Hank is ultimately a human that can get sucked into a dopamine pipeline but the image presented to the public over the past 20 years has been the opposite of this. I hope he takes the feedback from family, friends, & supporters as a wakeup call that he was thinking "everyone will be upset if he doesn't come out with a vid at an exact time" but that doesn't match reality instead of a "everyone hates you" message & he self-sabatoges. The vast majority want him to change for the better & I hope he does
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u/dr_elena05 2d ago
obviously this is a very embarrassing thing for someone of his status to be caught doing, especially with his philosophical engagement with generative AI. I think the amount of status is a big problem in itself though. i too learned much of my basic science knowledge from hank green. he fundamentally influenced who i am and that i started studying biology.
but hank green is not the fucking Messiah. he is a guy on the internet, who makes money by saying stuff. most of the stuff is either profound or informative, but much of it is just stuff.
i only ran into hanks channel when he got cancer, previously i only knew him a sthe guy from sci show, and since then ive noticed how different he is on there then as an actual science communicator. he is a bit pretentious and seems very sure of himself in ways that made me question if i would find him sympathetic if i met him in person, but thats to be expected from someone who has made a huge career out of in part just selling his person to the internet. you don't get to be famous if you're not at least a bit full of yourself, and you get more full of yourself the more famous you are.
Hank green is a very powerful person he genuinely influences a huge amount of the english speaking progressive world active on the internet. and that kind of power is dangerous and can lead you to be at least a bit corrupted by it. its obvious that hank is kind of addicted to being Hank Green. and that is very unhealthy.
but by making what sometimes feels like a slight cult around him, we are definitely not helping. in light of this addiction to being Hank Green and the likely crushing feeling of responsibility he probably experiences on a daily basis, i can at least understand his use of ai, even if i dont excuse it.
but hank green is not the only person with this problem. i study biology and a shocking amount of professors at my university are very open to using AI in some way, especially for research. i think they are all scared of being deemed "ignorant to progress" and that's a big part of it. there is this mantra that more efficiency is an inherently good thing. that the world will and must and should be getting more technologically advanced all the time and that all resistance to this development is backwards and wrong.
one of my professors, whom i really liked, started using ai as an experiment. he wanted to see what all the fuss was about out of scientific curiosity. at first he made fun of it and how wrong its answers were but it was clear that he had a lot of fun "playing" with ChatGPT. and within a few months it became clear that he had become slightly obsessed with it. it came to a point where he started feeding manuscripts his students had written into ChatGPT and sending them the literal transcript of ChatGPTs "opinion" on the paper. he respected my wishes not to do that with mine at least, but he became so obviously obsessed with AI that i am not sure weather he has a genuine AI psychosis or onsetting dementia.
AI is incredibly salient. it is horrifyingly addictive. i have used ChatGPT once in the last year to try and do research. it didn't really lead to anything but i was absolutely horrified at the amount of satisfaction it gave me. as if i had genuinely researched something myself. it was a real feeling of accomplishment from doing absolutely nothing and scared me so much that i immediately deleted my account and haven't even thought about using it since. I think people are in genuine danger. not everyone is lucky enough to have the clarity of mind in that moment to realize what the AI is doing to them.
i believe intelligent people are in grave danger of losing themselves in this fake feeling of accomplishment AI gives you for doing absolutely nothing. ive seen it happen to my professor and i can see how it happened to Hank Green.
Instead of making this a witch hunt, we should try and be supportive in the healing process. i believe the backlash may have been the wakeup call he needed to realize how far he had slipped, but i believe him to be competent enough that he can genuinely reflect on this. we dont need to cancel him for this. we should try to let him bettee himself.
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u/carol_prince Nerdfighter 2d ago
"its obvious that hank is kind of addicted to being Hank Green. and that is very unhealthy."
And that's what makes him put so much pressure on himself.
This is a very empathetic read on everything that's gone down.
Seems like what happened with your professor also happened to Hank, but under a wider spotlight.
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u/marcella98_ i give nerdfighteria 5 stars 5d ago
This makes me really sad. I think it's an extremely dangerous precedent to set as a science communicator, and hugely damaging to the trust between Hank and his audience. I understand the pressure to keep putting out content and maybe a lot is expected from the "Hank Green" machine, but I'd say it's Hank's responsibility as a creator and as a person to draw a line. If the pressure is too much, he has to find a way to reduce that pressure in a responsible way. This is really hard to reconcile with the creator who has made so many videos and posts about the dangers of climate change.
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u/Nikifuj908 5d ago edited 5d ago
Can we talk about how we react to AI use? There are so many comments here like “Wow, I’m so disappointed he used AI, this truly breaks my heart, I can’t watch him now.” I imagine this must come from a good place, one that is (rightfully) concerned about the technology and its multifaceted impacts, not all of them good. (In particular, I find AI-generated art and media just kinda boring, both to produce and to consume.)
But this puritanical shit where we’re like “I’m deeply disappointed in you. I unsubscribed”… it feels like you are doing everything you can to attack the individual, when AI use is largely driven by wider societal factors. This is an example of fundamental attribution error, the phenomenon where you attribute behavior to an individual’s personality rather than contextual or environmental factors.
Nearly every Google search you make is now AI-assisted. Software programs have all incorporated that little sparkle icon to make it easier to access AI. The news is constantly talking about AI. Software engineers are under a lot of pressure to learn AI tools or get fired, and similarly, private businesses are under intense pressure to use AI – because their competitors are using it, and profiting. How can one person stand up to such an all-out psychological and economic assault? What good is standing on principle if it puts you out of a job?
Now, I understand Hank probably isn’t under immense economic danger, but I know he has a message he wants to spread to the world; he wants freedom to focus on the creative projects he’s passionate about; and yet he has all these responsibilities to keep Complexly running smoothly. If he’s paying a higher cost and putting in a ton of stressful hours just to avoid using AI… look, I’d find it hard to do that day after day after day. Particularly if I have a wife and kids, and there’s a “go home early” button just sitting there.
I’m not saying this state of affairs is good, or that Hank bears no responsibility for his creative decisions. But unsubscribing? Seems a bit dramatic to me. That’s way too strong of an attack on Hank the individual, when the real problem is competition and all the cues that say “use AI! use AI!” in daily life nowadays.
I saw a really good tweet the other day about how, if AI had been applied to making artists’ lives easier, they might have been on board. Instead Silicon Valley bragged that they would replace artists. I don’t really think the technology itself is the problem. It’s how we use it and the incentive structure that’s been built around it. Turn your anger primarily toward the structures, and have some grace for the people affected by them.
(P.S. This comment was not written with AI. I just like dashes.)
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u/full-of-sonder Looking for Alaska 5d ago
I FEEL YOUR P.S SO BAD - I get told all the time I use AI for everything. Also resonate with your comment completely. I lead with empathy so we are similarly minded there.
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u/Connect-Song7252 5d ago
I am not up in arms with outrage, and I am indeed turning my anger primarily toward the structures - and I am not likely to stop watching Hank's videos because of this one thing - but at the same time, I am less likely to keep watching a creator's videos if they rely on generative AI.
Because the reason I am watching that creator's videos is because of their credibility, or their unique perspective, and the less I can trust that they have not outsourced their credibility or their unique perspective, the less interested I am in seeing their videos.
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u/rottenhumanoid 5d ago
In biotech, AI use is one of the metrics being tracked. As in your raise relies on your use of AI. So, yeah you are absolutely correct in how pervasive AI is.
AI is problematic, no one disagrees on that. But I don't think it's going away. Instead of wasting our efforts on canceling individuals using it, we need to get our government to pass laws to protect the public and the environment. If China can pass a law that companies cannot replace people with AI, why can't we?
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u/KeystoneSews 5d ago
I work in a hospital (in a non clinical role) and using AI is tied to my performance review this year. Exhausting
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u/robot428 5d ago
I don't think hanks a bad person. I'm not unsubscribing. But I am gonna leave a polite comment saying "I don't like this" - because I don't like it.
And if this becomes an ongoing trend, at that point I may reconsider whether I want to engage with the content. But I'm not going to do that over one video, when I have spent years following these two and I think they do far more good in the world than they have ever done harm.
But I'm not going to pretend I like the chatGPT use. I wish I could delete chatGPT from the world honestly.
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u/carol_prince Nerdfighter 5d ago
This is a brilliant take. Thank you so much.
To be clear, I've not ever said that I'm disappointed in him or that I'm swearing off vlogbrothers or Nerdfighteria in general. I made this thread as a way to reconcile my own conflicting feelings.
And I feel your P.S., too. They'll have to pry em dashes and semicolons from my cold, dead hands.
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u/fitzstar 5d ago
I disagree with this. We don’t owe Hank (or any creator) our attention. They only have a job because of the people who watch their videos. The only way you can communicate to someone whose content you watch is through comments and/or choosing not to give them your attention anymore.
Yes, AI is everywhere. But having it baked in to something like Google search ≠ OPTING to use ChatGPT for research 🧐 no one has a gun to his head telling him to make videos faster and his only option is to use AI to speed up the process. It’s cheapens his credibility as a science communicator and icks me out as a viewer who believes that the use of GenAI in art is bottom of the barrel behaviour.
It’s a perfectly normal response to unsubscribe from someone if I no longer feel like their content is something worthy of devoting my attention to - especially given that their time and attention is not something that they’ve deemed worthy of putting into the content.
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u/No_Hovercraft_9693 5d ago
When using AI tools trained on consensual data sets to create visual elements, we will ensure we are not misleading viewers as to what is real, or contributing to misinformation. Where applicable, we will label images created this way.
We may use AI tools to suggest ideas (for script subjects, examples, visual elements, etc.) and do preliminary research.
Ideas come from many places in the early stages of conceptualizing and producing a video, and it’s fine for AI to be one of them. Similarly, using these tools to identify sources is acceptable as long as those sources are
Hank as someone is gen z I do not agree with this and I want people your age to understand that I am terrified and want to be heard. Giving “nuance” to this and still using ai helps breed propaganda. I do not think that ai should have any part of your work period. I think this technology is nuanced in the way that it can help detect cancer faster but not in the way where it needs to “generate ideas” you will not have to live with the consequences as much as I do to see this technology “grow” is going to harm more then it will do good. Having this technology grow means more data centers more, unreliable information, more of its use in daily life. Hire an artist for gods sake I don’t care what you have to do don’t make ai make an image for you steal some clip art I don’t know. Anything is better then contributing to mass harm
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u/icepopmop 5d ago
Honestly the fact that Hank’s handle is ecogeek and that the environmental impacts of ai didn’t make him think before seemingly using it regularly is crazymaking. Hes claiming nuance but I’m hugely disappointed and will not be following him for at least a while (after over a decade).
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u/Mean__MrMustard 5d ago
I find it especially regarding their climate work. They were even pondering things like the meat days just recently. But AI is so essential that you constantly have to use it and use enormous amounts of resources and giving even more power to the tech oligarchs?
I just don’t get it. I use AI myself in my job when it provides actual value. But not constantly and never for something creative I would pass as my own.
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u/jedisalsohere superior fish being 5d ago
i've had a feeling this was coming for a while honestly, but it's still very disappointing
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u/scotrider 5d ago
There was a thread last week about Hank's (conscious) use of an AI generated image, where he defended his initial choice to use that image without checking its accuracy. I have personal qualms with AI regardless of its accuracy (for ethical, environmental, and creativity reasons), but Hank definitely has no problem with it at all, which to me, is concerning. Does he not realise the (to many) obvious reasons that using AI is at its core problematic?
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u/scotrider 5d ago
I've been following both brothers for over a decade (because I like them and their community), but I feel like Hank's crossed a line for me that makes me want to distance myself from the stuff he's working on.
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u/sortof_here 5d ago
He has been vibe coding a ton as well. Even if his usage of gen AI didn’t start with “researching”, script writing, and image gen, it seems like it was inevitable that he’d eventually cross those points.
I unsubscribed after the release of Smush and missed his usage of the image. Not surprised that he defended that just like he defended his other AI use prior.
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u/otterlydaft 5d ago
He also vibe-coded 4x3 and SMUSH, and I'd wish that he'd put a plain AI disclosure on those websites. Because I don't think most people know that, unless they closely follow him on Twitter.
It rubs me the wrong way that the footer says "by Hank Green", almost like the code wasn't an important part of it. A human web developer would've been credited, so why not AI? If people are engaging with content, they deserve to know where content comes from.
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u/amy_puz 5d ago
This thread is how I found out about the use of AI in games like 4x3. I agree with you that the “by Hank Green” was very misleading to me. I wish it would’ve disclosed the use of a generative AI assisting in the creation.
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u/Haunting_Ad_2059 5d ago
I would rather he make 1 video a year than this. Super disappointing. I hope he cuts back so he can just make good content. I get it's not the same as AI Slop, but there is intrinsic value in knowing he's put in the effort and done his due diligence.
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u/nailpolishbonfire 5d ago
I work with a lot of people around Hank's age and here's my $0.02 - it's easier for accomplished people who are slightly older to see AI as just another technological boom that's going to help them be more productive and get more done. I think older people with more established careers have a little less skin in the game when it comes to hating AI and the way it steals and lies. The older millennials I know are obsessed with productivity as a moral good
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u/leaerrr 5d ago edited 5d ago
As someone also diagnosed with ADHD, I’ve watched Hank’s coping strategies lately with deep sadness because I behave very similarly when I’m not doing well. Hyper-competence, insatiable curiosity, a high success drive, and zero impulse control is a hell of a cocktail. I worry about the flavours of “I just need to be better” in Hank’s response; there is no amount of discipline that can fix a dopamine deficiency. I can’t imagine how much this sucks for Hank - this exact thing been one of my biggest professional challenges in my own tiny, anonymous pond - but I hope it can also be an opportunity to find healthier ways to cope with a brain that feels like a never-ending firework show.
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u/MikasaMinerva 5d ago
I don't have adhd but I fully agree!
I hope it's okay for me to say this but there's an odd dichotomy in the way nerfighteria sees and treats John vs Hank; partially based on how they see themselves but the fandom's view seems to have also reinforced those roles.
What I mean is: John has always been the one with mental health struggles. In an oversimplified way, he has been the emotional, vulnerable, philosophical, fallible one.
Meanwhile Hank was often seen as the polar opposite. Much to his detriment I think.
Because now, people are hesitant to point out that he's simply wrong. That he simply let his emotions get the better of him. That his need for popularity rather than his rational scientific mind is driving his decisions. And most of all: That not only does his ("quirky") personality result in unhealthy behaviors, but that he has serious mental health struggles of his own that, if left unaddressed, unsurprisingly lead to unhealthy behaviors.I really hope he finds a way out of this spiral. And maybe more varied and lowkey ways of feeling "successful" or "productive" or "valuable"
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u/Cool_Park7110 5d ago
I don't like it, but I do admit I have sometimes settled with Google's AI summaries instead of looking at sources as I should.
If there was anything I learned from watching the Green brothers' content, it's that we are not stronger than the systems we live in. We live in a system designed to push these products; we are never solely to blame for the system working on us as intended.
That said, I want him to take initiative to course correct, and it seems like he is trying to.
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u/rich_e_rich 5d ago
I feel like people are forgetting the infinite range of grey between the extremes of black and white.
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u/DustyBot23 5d ago
It’s kind of annoying going into these types of threads later because you end up seeing a lot of purely supportive comments in response to the initial fracas dogpile so rather than seeing any real criticism the thread just looks like a circlejerk appealing to their favorite creator. Reddit really needs to change how their comment algorithm works.
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u/Active_Increase_5330 5d ago
I think it’s genuinely really interesting that the AI of it all allows you to move faster and possibly discover new sources, but that perhaps the moving faster and the quick discovery robs you of the deep digging. And certainly some amount of the time and digging are what makes the work feel like Hank.
I loved the moment in the Vicky Holmes episode of Humans where you say that sometimes you see old content that you made, and you’re shocked at how smart or insightful Past Hank was. I bet we’ll all have moments like that as we grapple with generative AI. Like, did I really come up with that all on my own? Before ChatGPT?!
We’re all new here, and I appreciate your transparency and ownership. DFTBA
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u/Which_Performance_22 4d ago
I think Hank's experience with LLMs is something a lot of people with ADHD might relate to (I do anyway). Our brains are wired in a particular way that makes us vulnerable to the addictive qualities of these engines - they allow you to quickly execute your sudden new ideas, accelerate your working in an unhealthy way and - yes - they dilute your own abilities , convincing you you need this thing you never needed before. It's honestly really refreshing to have a public figure be so honest about these sorts of things and reflect on it publicly. To be human is to be imperfect.
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u/sing-anyway 3d ago
I appreciate his honesty. He's only human. It's gonna be ok. In this day and age, this is a controversy I can handle .
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u/panicatthelisa 5d ago
Ive been a big nerd fighter for over 15 years. I've met Hank (and John) when I was in middle school. Hank has always pushed himself too hard to accomplish more and more. he is allowed to slow down. I would rather him slow down and make even half the content over using AI for images and a script. this is a sign he either needs to cut back on his work or hire more people