Hank Green has become a living testament to the theory that using AI too much melts content creators’ brains, even if they don’t generate their actual content with it.
Internet drama over this issue is heated and still ongoing, even though Green—who is the brother of YA author John Green and an early YouTube star turned science explainer guy—has already apologized. More than that, he has provided a lengthy account of what he perceives the problem to be. He might differ with my summary “using AI too much melts content creators’ brains,” so here’s part of his version:
“[…] 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 [my wife] Katherine last night and she did not pull any punches. Frankly, neither did [my brother] John. Neither of them think I’ve been being healthy. I need to readjust.”
The apparent issue came to light when Green answered a pointed question during one of his videos, and his answer included the line “A better way to say it, and I appreciate the pushback, is a word is a human invention, and human inventions are made by bodies and brains working together.” LLMs say things like “I appreciate the pushback” all the time when they hallucinate or otherwise output something weird or wrong and the user corrects it.
In a now deleted tweet, Green denied that he was reading something generated by an LLM, but acknowledged that he uses LLM notes, and that the video has an “AI feel.” In his lengthy apology and explanation on Reddit, he describes using LLMs, specifically ChatGPT, as something of a crutch. He describes it as useful for quickly accessing scholarly papers, and—more troublingly—for giving himself frequent hits of “dopamine,” a habit that other people in his life have noticed.
Fan reactions have been mixed. Many have been supportive, but there are full-throated denunciations, like one that calls this debacle “disgusting” and says it will “set science communication back YEARS.”
Most negative comments are more ambivalent. One says, “Regardless of the actual validity or otherwise of AI — of whether or not there are, in fact, valid use cases for it — I just don’t think the community that Hank and John have cultivated over the last 20 years is one that’s ever going to accept AI.”
Many comments are just nerdy and inscrutable, like: “Oh that’s awful. Guess he forgot to be awesome.”
The takeaway for viewers from all this, according to Green, is that he needs to slow his creative output in order to curb his reliance on LLMs. He says his personal YouTube channel will be updated less frequently, and that his puzzle games Smush and 4×3 will be paused altogether.
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