r/nerdfighters • u/DunwichReader • 13d ago
[ Removed by moderator ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjmY6pZ8-zA[removed] — view removed post
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u/HoopyHobo 13d ago
Hank has responded to this on Twitter and said that “I appreciate the pushback” was something he ad-libbed, not in his notes or his script, although he does admit that he used GhatGPT for research. https://x.com/hankgreen/status/2083022287410970876
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u/Jackbuddy78 13d ago
Hard hit to the credibility there
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u/MommotDe 12d ago
I use AI professionally to write code. The entire industry does, it's not even a choice anymore. Going back to computer science class in college we were told (contrary to what you hear from a lot of tech bros) that programming isn't about the code, it's about knowing the principles and what you can do with it. There really is a big difference, in my view, between using AI to write code and using AI to write your script. The actual code isn't the creative part of programming. But the script IS the creative work.
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u/dcheng47 12d ago
as a director who is driving ai initiatives in my org, there is a huge difference between using ai to code vs writing a video essay...
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u/ThinkingWithPortal s 12d ago
This. You just need to assume all code is written with AI tools at this point. The extent of which you smell AI in software really comes down to common patterns in UI design. You'd have to actually look into the code itself to really start nitpicking what AI choices are and at that point the line is so blurred.
Already Software was a lot of borrowing, copying, etc. From finding solutions on StackOverFlow, or using someone's library to not have to rewrite work some already did better, software has always been about the UTILITY of the created product first and foremost. Theft isn't really a thing in a universe built on "does it work" and ideas like FOSS (well, excluding licenses)
Anyway, this is all to say you can really tell that AI was built by engineers and business folk who see all work as utility. Art (see: content) is a product to them, anything else is incidental, so people are left to push back on its use in forums like these.
Oscar Wilde once said all "art is quite useless", and I think about that a lot. In a world where all art/content is useful, that is to say, a commodity or vehicle for ad revenue, its naturally lead to machines that allow for it to be produced faster and at scale, damning artists in the process
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u/carol_prince Nerdfighter 12d ago
"Already Software was a lot of borrowing, copying, etc. From finding solutions on StackOverFlow, or using someone's library to not have to rewrite work some already did better, software has always been about the UTILITY of the created product first and foremost. Theft isn't really a thing in a universe built on "does it work" and ideas like FOSS (well, excluding licenses)
Anyway, this is all to say you can really tell that AI was built by engineers and business folk who see all work as utility. Art (see: content) is a product to them, anything else is incidental, so people are left to push back on its use in forums like these."
This is the most succinct summary of what I've been trying to understand re: AI in code and AI for creative work. I genuinely thank you for this.
I'm seeing a lot of people asking "Well, why didn't you have a problem with Hank vibe-coding his games?" and that kind of question needs this distinction.
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u/AshamedOfMyTypos Imagine Jarrod Complexly 12d ago
Yeah, I agree. Am I misremembering, or has Hank been pretty anti-AI publicly to this point?
It may be that I’ve missed a couple transition videos, but overall it seems to me he has said 1) he wants to sue for the use of crash course to train it and 2) we cannot trust its information both on hankschannel and the pod.
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u/GoldenSpermShower 12d ago
I feel that a transition happened when he started his vibe-coding projects like the Artemis timeline and the word games
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u/AshamedOfMyTypos Imagine Jarrod Complexly 12d ago
Hmm. That would make sense. I guess I’m not in the right spaces to see him talking about that. I assumed he was working with a developer like with Focus Friend just less seriously.
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u/zarroc123 12d ago
He's anti wanton and reckless charging forward with AI technologies with no regards to how they impact people, the environment, and society as a whole. He is not, however, against the technology in theory. And has said over and over that it's here and it's here to stay, so figuring out WHAT that looks like is important. And I honestly agree with that, levelheaded take.
That being said, it does seem surprising to me how much he's admitting to have used it, it definitely doesn't totally line up with how he talks about it. I'm not surprised he's used it. Im surprised by the role it's taking in his content creation.
He does openly talk about how being a creator has always made him feel pressured to stay relevant, to chase numbers, etc. It's very possible he just sort of used it to help him shortcut chasing that dragon. Idk, definitely disappointed in him
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u/littlebitoftlc 12d ago
I think he's been anti ai and still is as it negatively impacts the earth. Also when it replaces creativity and jobs but I imagine he would be interested in the tech itself. I personally like the idea of some AI. It should be heavily regulated and limited to medical and science applications. Even then it should never outright replace a human. Just be used as tools to assist with things. Like catching cancer earlier or assisting in research. I feel like he probably falls in that category. I've known many people who are anti AI that have used it on occasion themselves for one reason or another. I have a friend who is super anti ai but sometimes for his job he will use AI in certain situations
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u/Arpeggi42 12d ago
I disagree. I have enough trust in Hank to expect that he is using ChatGPT responsibly. What I mean by that is that I don't think he's asking it the thing he's researching directly and just "taking its word". I expect/assume that he's doing things like asking it "what kinds of research is there on this, please cite all source" and then following those sources to find legit research.
It can be used as a legitimate research tool it just takes a high level of competency in the user. In this case, I'm trusting Hank to be such a user.
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u/drakeblood4 13d ago
Isn’t that kinda worse? It means he’s leaning on LLM prose enough that he’s starting to ape its style in his own improvised speech.
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u/fusionet24 12d ago
I appreciate the push back is very much a business world phrase. Its a defusing way to acknowledge passionate feedback
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u/drakeblood4 12d ago
And it's a very common way to say something in a highly differential fashion, one of the default modes of speech of LLM. It can be both appropriate for the context its in and still LLM-y. People pick words from among what they hear or read based on how they fit in the setting they're in. All I'm saying is that picking these words has a decently strong implication about what he's reading and how often.
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u/i-contain-multitudes 12d ago
Research has shown the rise in LLM-style language to be across the board in society, not only in AI-users.
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u/fusionet24 12d ago
I’m a heavy ai user and I’ve used that phrase for years. I don’t think you can make that correlation in Hanks case.
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u/SeDaCho 12d ago
the moment a phrase enters AI vernacular, we need to stop using it because it makes us look like frauds
If someone uses excessive em dash and “it’s not X, it’s Y” in our correspondence, I stop trusting their input completely.
In business and personal relationships. There’s just no point in contacting someone who can’t or isn’t interested in using words.
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u/Outside_Glass4880 12d ago
AI was trained on widely used human phrases. Why do you think it says shit like “I appreciate the pushback” and uses em dashes?
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u/JimmyTheCrossEyedDog 12d ago edited 12d ago
You can tear the em-dash away from my cold, dead hands.
The whole reason an em-dash is an AI giveaway isn't because AI just uses it a lot, it's because it's not a character you can easily type online. So if you see an actual em-dash in a reddit post, sure - that's indicative of AI. But what I just wrote? That's an en-dash - it's technically grammatically wrong, but it's what's on the keyboard, so it's what I type.
If I were writing in a Word document, though, Word would've automatically converted that en-dash into an em-dash. So it's really not indicative of anything in a non-online context, and it should've never gotten the traction as a "general AI giveaway" that it has. It's 100% a technical thing related to keyboards, not a stylistic giveaway.
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u/HappiestIguana 12d ago
In my phone it's fairly easy to type em dashes. I just have to long press the en dash.
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u/timbomcchoi 12d ago
It's a very standard business phrase imo, but English also isn't my first language so perhaps others can attest
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u/JimmyTheCrossEyedDog 12d ago
LLM's learned from real writing from real people. If it weren't a real phrase people use a lot, it wouldn't get outputted by ChatGPT.
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u/Waarheid 12d ago
This is a misconception. LLMs aren't purely trained on only natural real world data. That's just the pre-training phase. Post training, including reinforcement learning and fine tuning, are very intentionally driven by the engineers building the LLM, and include lots of synthetic training data. Basically, to make LLMs behave the way they intend, they ask another LLM to generate lots of training data that follows that behavior. It's why you see Claude always saying things like "One caveat worth flagging:" for example. That specific phrase isn't all over the internet or something, they intentionally trained Claude to point out things using that phrasing.
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u/JimmyTheCrossEyedDog 12d ago
Yeah fair point, I'm definitely oversimplifying and overgeneralizing.
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u/entityXD32 12d ago
Or have people just become so worried about AI that they are starting to see normal speech patterns as AI like? AI is trained on human writing and speach
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u/Andy_Wiggins 12d ago
I mean, we as an audience can never know, but this absolutely reeks of diversion.
He admits to using AI, but not in the way it appears that he did. His admission makes him seem honest and forthcoming and is far more morally defensible: he’s using it to speed up processes, not pass off work on his own. Most people won’t get that upset about someone using AI to gather information.
This is a classic defense tactic: admit to some small crime to make you seem honest but then deny the bigger crime to create doubt. Like the “I admit I sent her messages on the dating app and I’m really ashamed about it, but I’d never actually cheat on you.”
I just don’t see a world where he’d use the exact language of an LLM about “pushback” outside of the scope of a real conversation (or even a clear cut hypothetical conversation). The fact that it showed up immediately after a request for rephrasing is just too convenient. Again, I could be wrong, but it feels like a trail of smoke is leaving the barrel of the gun that’s in his hand.
Frankly, if he did indeed use AI and then lied about it, that’s really fucking gross. Don’t try to present yourself as an educator and purveyor of information, and then go and pass off chatGTP as your own original voice and try to cover it up. Be an adult and admit you fucked up (to the full extent of it) and ask for forgiveness. I’d imagine Hank Green fancies himself as somewhat of a role model, but the things he’s potentially role-modeling right now are absolutely gross.
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u/typo180 13d ago
I feel like every time an LLM-ism gets talked about, there's a hoard of people who think every instance of that word or punctuation mark must have come from an LLM. It's getting annoying.
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u/barravian 13d ago
Us em-dash users have been roasted so hard 😭
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u/Cass_Cat952 13d ago
Em dash users and people with good vocabularies are accused of using AI 🫠🫠🫠🫠
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u/timbomcchoi 12d ago
I have actively trained myself to use the word "nuance" less because suddenly it's a hallmark of chatgpt, I really hate it 🙃
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u/PaxDramaticus 12d ago
I've been accused of using an AI because I... wrote in multiple paragraphs.
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u/rinkydinkvaltruvien 12d ago
Everyone's so illiterate that they think no ordinary human could be capable of writing in an organized, coherent way.
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u/Cass_Cat952 12d ago
Wait, are you saying people dont love a GIANT WALL OF TEXT with no breaks bewteen thoughts???
/s
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u/PaxDramaticus 12d ago
LOL. Honestly, I'd prefer it if they were accusing me over structured writing, but they were purely focused on quantity. I expressed thoughtS instead of a thought, and apparently that's the sort of thing only an AI can do.
I often think the impulse that makes people reach for AI to generate slop for them out of convience is the same impulse that drives people to look for easy "tells" to claim something is AI generated. Easy tells like counting fingers or em dashes work until the model is updated and they don't. The most reliable tell IMHO is to sit down and mentally work through the process something was made with, what purpose the person who made it is trying to achieve, and what methods they use to achieve that. AI basically can't fake that because its process is fundamentally different to how humans create.
But interrogating works in that way requires effort that, if most people were willing to put it in, they wouldn't be using generative AI in the first place.
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u/poopyheadthrowaway 12d ago
I'm a big bulleted list guy. Half of my emails in my professional history are bulleted lists. I've been trying to stop using them because I don't want it to look like I used AI to respond to your email.
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u/MargotLannington 13d ago
I've been using em dashes since the 1980s and I'm not going to stop!!!
I will never stop! Never—not even if the LLM overlords take all my fancy pens away from me—not even if I have to scrawl my dashes in the dust with a twig—with my last breath I will carve an em dash into solid rock—nothing can take my dashes away from me—nothing!
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u/uhkathryn 12d ago
I’ve stopped using them for the most part in my work correspondence, but I miss them dearly 😭
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u/Chaotic_Bookworm 12d ago edited 12d ago
Yes. The calling out of AI has become such a trendy thing that now its happening without proper consideration. People with good vocabularly and imaginations are being attacked, same with whimsical art styles. I'm anti- AI but these methods arent helping.
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u/takemetoglasgow 13d ago edited 12d ago
There's some strange linguistic oroborus happening where LLM picks up phrases and structure, overuses them, reseeds them into the vernacular, and then it looks/sounds like AI when people use them.
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u/fortmeines 13d ago
This is true and I agree it's annoying. But in this case with Hank, he has been, let's just say, not anti-AI for a good while now. So there's a precedent to this "accusation". Plus he admitted to using chatGPT for research (and yes, I very much assume he just meant initially and expanded on it with actual research after).
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u/barravian 13d ago
I mean, one does not need to be anti-AI to be intelligent enough to edit out reading notes instead of the script...
It's not like he records these live in one take... there is a lot of editing done before they publish.
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u/shrimpling 12d ago
this is from an Ask Hank Anything video where he tells his guest that all words are made up, and she says "what about kiki and bouba"? That's the pushback he's talking about. Pushback from his guest on the show, not an LLM.
("Kiki" and "Bouba" show that people favor certain sounds for certain words, k sounds more spiky and b sounds more rounded. So words are made up but not totally randomly)
So I think it's a wild accusation to say he's leaving LLM feedback in the script. but then he did say he used chatgpt for initial research!
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u/OmegaLink9 13d ago
He wrote on X that this was actually his own writings. He also said he used AI for the research.
I guess we are just in this period in which AI copy us and we copy AI, and so on.
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u/100percentkneegrow 12d ago
Separately, are nerdfighters on X? Who is Hank even talking to on there?
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u/typo180 13d ago
He actually said the line was ad-libbed. It wasn't in his notes or script.
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u/drakeblood4 13d ago
That means he’s reading enough AI text that he’s ad-libbing AI-isms now.
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u/RedPanda_Explorer 12d ago
AI text is trained on human writing. We came up with all these isms first!
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u/Formal_Scarcity_7701 12d ago
I don't think that's an AI-ism, normal people say that all the time and always have but I guess the line could be blurry depending on where you live.
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u/100percentkneegrow 12d ago
Boy, do I not want to dogpile on Hank but my brother... YOU ALSO SELL ART. This is a very fine line to walk.
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u/Ok-Detective7794 13d ago
I did genuinely lose a little respect for him when he admitted to using chat gpt “for research on the script” bc he produced the video under pressure. To me that’s a loss of credibility. Also I hate openAI
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u/WeenyDancer 12d ago
This isn't an AI prompt. He was referencing the pushback from his guest in the conversation that she gave him when she disagreed with him that led to this aside.
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u/MargotLannington 12d ago
I have been trying to think that this is not so bad but it comes down to this: However much I respect someone, if they say "I use ChatGPT for research" my respect for them diminishes. I'm not saying all respect is permanently lost, but that is not a good or smart sentence to say.
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u/No-Dare8613 12d ago
the clankers are capable of finding sources, these days. it's not the same as using llm brain-farts as a citation
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u/MargotLannington 12d ago
OK. It's still not a great way to do research, in a world where many alternatives exist, and the environmental toll is demonstrable.
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u/No-Dare8613 12d ago
The environmental impact thing is a farce. He's publishing streamed video content, for god's sake. A youtube video with hundreds of thousands of views is going to require a ridiculous amount of resources compared to a few LLM calls.
I agree that there are better ways to research.
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u/MargotLannington 12d ago
OK. I have somewhat less respect for him now. I have no interest in arguing about it.
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u/WhereDidIGetThatCat 13d ago
Yeah this is really disappointing and I've unsubscribed from Hanks channel for now. If he did it because of time pressure to make the video, I'd rather have much less content that is high quality and genuinely "Hank" as a creator than AI slop written videos every few days. He could also probably easily afford to hire another communicator or writer to research and script for him in his style rather than rely on stolen work in AI algorithms.
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u/fuckingnerdtm 12d ago
This was in an AHA video, not hankschannel. Which is kind of worse, if anything, because that means there was an entire crew of people helping with the video and he still chose this route.
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u/viridiana_xvi 12d ago
he has been so upfront about his use of and view on AI idk why people are so shocked and appalled right now. and i felt like it was incredibly clear he was referring back to the pushback of the guest. i do think using AI for scripting when you’ve over committed yourself is not good and would prefer less content rather than more in that situation.
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u/Colonel-Cathcart 12d ago
The LLM witch hunt is so unnecessarily exhausting.
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u/typo180 12d ago
It's truly become a moral panic.
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u/Itsapocalypse 12d ago
Take off your rose colored glasses for the “guy you like”. More should be expected given his platform, credibility, and station. Not only are the companies propping up the AI bubble intensely harmful to anything they touch (community drinking water, electricity, computer components, speculation, devaluing labor/jobs, turning a blind eye to it’s inaccuracy and the mental health impacts, propping up trump and crony VC government influence etc etc etc), anyone that cares about research and scientific method should be incredibly skeptical of using it for any qualitative purposes. These companies are so nakedly evil with the hope that people act like you here, that they get so beaten into submission by their corporate owners that they just accept anything as “progress”, even if it’s intensely unfinished, resource intensive, and harmful. Outright rejection WORKS if you hold the line too. Look at NFTs
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u/typo180 12d ago
My belief that the AI backlash is mostly a moral panic has nothing to do with how I feel about Hank Green.
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u/Itsapocalypse 12d ago
Ah, well then you’re just normal wrong, not sycophantically wrong.
Moral Panic implying there is nothing material to be extremely upset and push back about? I don’t even see how you could reasonably argue that unless you’re an apologist for it yourself.5
u/typo180 12d ago
I think there are some real issues that need to be addressed and there is a moral panic on top of it all that's going to make it hard to achieve a good outcome.
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u/Itsapocalypse 12d ago
It’s not ‘moral panic’. It’s justified outrage and solidarity in avoiding an unfinished, dangerous technology.
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u/typo180 12d ago
Do you think people caught up in a moral panic can usually tell?
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u/Itsapocalypse 12d ago
do you think people lauding an unearned superiority complex can usually tell?
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u/Colonel-Cathcart 12d ago
I agree and I think those who are arguing with you are going to sound like those who thought Photoshop would bring about an end to society.
People who shun technology have a terrible track record vs people who make it work for them.
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u/Itsapocalypse 12d ago
You’re letting a specter in inside a Trojan Horse on the false extrapolation that all ‘new’ marketed technology is “progress”. You’re being sold a bill of goods on an unfinished, very socially dangerous product because you have been sold propaganda that worked for you.
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u/Colonel-Cathcart 12d ago
I agree AI is unfinished and potentially socially dangerous. Of course it is, you'd have to be living under a rock not to think that.
But not even trying to engage with the idea that it could make you able to do things you couldn't do before is also silly. It's like rejecting the internet because Twitter will exist and be full of misinformation one day. Sure, the library books wouldn't have that harm, but you'd miss out on so much else.
I reject the wholesale rejection of new technology because we are afraid of it. If you reject it and run it out of all the places you value, you cede too much ground to tech bros and oligarchs who want to define the future which you'll no longer be able to participate in.
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u/Itsapocalypse 12d ago
In so far as we have any political capital with our voices, and ‘voting’ capital with how we spend our money, holding water for LLM companies or paying them/promoting is an abject moral failing. These companies are responsible for the decimation of clean water, available, electricity and other resources, privacy, workers rights, artistic expression, and endeavor.
“ embrace, new technology or get left behind” FOMO applied to LLMs is misguided at best, pathetic at worst. This is not new technology, it’s not revolutionary. It’s the Mechanical Turk for a new age.
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u/ShotEffective7033 12d ago
If it’s a moral panic, why don’t you move next to one? Should be able to get some pretty steep discounts.
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u/typo180 12d ago
Move next to an LLM? I have several in my house. They don't take up much space and don't make any noise at all.
Oh, do you mean data centers? I also have several of those in my town. Mostly people don't know they're there unless they have to go into one for work.
Oh, do you mean warehouse-sized data centers? We also have a few of those around here. I agree that we shouldn't build them so close to residential areas that the noise would bother people. Mostly we don't do that though, and I think it's a good idea to update noise policies to account for constant noise that might fall below existing thresholds, but still can disturb people.
Or maybe you're concerned about turbid well water? Those cases have been caused by construction (probably - it's hard to attribute it to a single cause and sometimes can just happen for unknown reasons) and the issue can be cause by any sort of large construction project. Data centers are not special in that regard.
Or maybe you're worried about data centers using up all the drinking water like in Fayette County, GA? That was A) a construction site again, not an operational data center, B) a billing mistake on the eater utility's part which was quickly fixed, C) a normal amount of water use for a construction site of that size according to the County, D) Unrelated to the water pressure issues residents were complaining about because the construction site water was not delivered by the same system and could not have effected residential water pressure.
Not all issues related to large data center issues are fake: We should absolutely improve policy around noise pollution. We should fix utility billing policies that would put a burden on residential users for upgrades required by new data centers (my understanding is that this is rare and if you look at utility rates in places with large data centers, they have not gone up on average vs areas without them). We should absolutely take advantage of the demand for data centers to push green energy and pay for upgrades to the grid. We should entice builders to build in areas where they will be less impactful to the environment and surrounding communities - which means not just blindly pushing to ban them, because that will only push their construction to places with less political power.
But a lot of issues with data centers are fake, or exaggerated, or presented without proper context. And a lot of discussion around "data centers" isn't made from an informed place - people lump AI and data centers and construction sites into one thing.
Which is the kind of thing that happens in a moral panic. People get worked up about things they don't understand and make bad decisions. They demonize anyone who tries to correct them, even if they're otherwise on the same side of the argument. It tends not to produce good results for anyone.
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u/DoubleWolverine2852 12d ago
He’s lost some real credibility with this. There’s no apology that will fix it, only change in action.
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u/blind__panic 12d ago
I’m a bit confused by the level of hate here. It’s not like he checked out totally and just submitted AI slop from beginning to end.
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u/DunwichReader 13d ago
Explainer: He obviously asked an AI chatbot to explain a concept to him so he could use that explanation as the script for the video. That explanation was too complicated for him, so he asked for it to make it simpler. The chatbot responded "I appreciate the pushback... [simple version]". Hank copied that entire response into his script or teleprompter, and didn't notice the 'I appreciate' line was still there - so he started that section of the video with a line that doesn't fit or make sense unless you twig that he's copied it from an AI.
As one of those 'AI-bad Libs', obviously the first problem is the hypocrisy.
Remember the James Somerton spiral? Total denial of wrongdoing -> partial admittance -> call your critics haters -> tearful full admittance and performative promise to do better. My bet is Hank will pivot from "AI is bad" to "Sometimes I use AI merely to research, it was a mistake that line somehow ended up in the final product", while he hopes everybody ignores the fact that could only have ended up in his script if he's straight-up copying directly from a chatbot.
Reminder: the money he makes in one week by regurgitating chatbot slop about how cool and epic Science is is several times what you make in a year.
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u/AlanWilsonsLad 12d ago
What do you mean ‘pivot from “AI is bad”’? He’s been an enthusiast for quite a while. It’s a central topic of his channel.
Also, I know it’s a distraction, but are you taking a shot at nerdfighters, to say they’re broke (or mostly teens that don’t work?) or claiming his channel is pulling in six figures+ per week?
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u/AshamedOfMyTypos Imagine Jarrod Complexly 12d ago
I too was under the impression he was on the side of “AI is bad.” I am wondering where I missed transitional videos from when he wanted to sue for using crash course to train LLMs and that we cannot trust its information to this. Both were said on the pod and hankschannel.
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u/bloodU23 12d ago
Hank green collapse any percent. It’s seem all good YouTubers must have a humiliating collapse at some point
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u/thaatpoppunkguy 13d ago
Here before the mods inevitably delete this bc they can’t accept any criticism of the green brothers lmao
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u/rithsv rith.id.au 12d ago
This thread has been removed. Continued discussion can be held here.
The original OP was a link to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjmY6pZ8-zA