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 think this is very honest and we shouldn’t give someone shit for speaking up.
This. AI and more generally algorithm dependence is an addiction and watching him struggle with it the past few years has been heartbreaking. Watching him try to bargain and rationalize an objectively misanthropic technology that grew out of a sphere that he was a major role in and did begin as an objectively beautiful attempt at building community and healthy dialogue is very disappointing. I don’t hate or judge him. He tried to do something beautiful. He just didn’t understand the Faustian bargain he made in the process. The systemic forces turning his work into poison.
I don’t judge him for wrestling with it. I’m sad for him. I’m sad for a lot of us. We’re all working in a system that’s slowly killing us to some degree or another. There is no ethically clean life in a system predicated on greed, gluttony and lies. His optimism may have slipped into delusional, but it beats the crushing cynicism that comes with naked realism.
I don’t think that we should lose hope, but the future can’t look like this. His Icarus moment shouldn’t be the end of his journey. I hope he finds himself and begins planting new seeds even if none of us ever live to see the shade of the trees that grow from them.
Well said
But this is the first time there’s been this significant of an impact on one’s mental health(?) I’m unsure. It’s so easy to get caught up in that dopamine hit where you feel like you did something. Its even more frustrating when you’re forced to use it in work regularly, whether directly or indirectly (if you’re coworkers are using it there is an indirect force to use it if you need to stay competitive and keep your job and feed yourself and your loved ones especially if your workspace is not healthy)
Thought experiment: is it better to treat the AI as a contractor (fivver etc) who is doing the task you’re asking rather than thinking of it as something you’re doing? From a mental health perspective A contractor because you are only to talk a out the task and nothing else really. That way it’s work could be more distant and you’re less likely to associate it to your work and boost in productivity?
No. This is a line we cannot cross and if it destroys us, so be it. I’m not against AI, or automation. But not these tools. Not these companies. Not these models. The question is death or death. So we learn to live without, or we die. There is no synthesis possible with this paradigm.
The cats out of the bag, so what are we gonna do now. Like replace that but not this with any other tech you should stop using, say social media, good luck. So what are we going to do now?
What do we do? We’re doing it. We’re asking questions, we’re building communities IRL and in digital paces outside the bounds of the major corps. We use poison pills to make corpos that embrace these systems pay dearly. We give grace to those who sincerely pull back and we move on.
Cocaine exists and it can be a major boost to productivity. But we don’t have to use it. We don’t have to live with its downsides slowly killing us and robbing us of our humanity.
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Yes. He doesn’t want to admit, he’s gone as far down this path as he responsibly can. He doesn’t want to transition to the “producer” role, where he becomes a resource for a new generation that’s seeking a future away from the old platforms.
It’s a bit like the oil man who knows his work enabled so much good, unable to also admit his product has a dark side, and it’s time for us all to move on from it. That times changed and a new world is struggling to be born.
I disagree about “edutainment” in a qualified way. We still need communicators and domain experts sharing their knowledge, and there’s still a great deal of knowledge to share, but I don’t think it’s on YouTube (or TikTok). People talking out of turn on matters so far outside their expertise and experience they’re effectively neophytes, and just as vulnerable to Dunning-Kruger impulses certainly doesn’t help. I don’t think that AI or better algorithms are going to save them either, that’s a good way to end up lost in a psychotic hallucination. I don’t know what it will look like yet but it isn’t going to come from the tech giants. Unless Wikipedia wants to take a crack at it, they might be the only ones that could pull it off.
I mean, we are all going to die. In fact it’s the fear of that that built these AI systems. If you want to go against them then accept death and extinction as our future.
No. I refuse. We may die, but I refuse to surrender. Where there is life, there is hope, and we’re not dead yet.
Hank Green has earned the right, with me anyway, to have his point of view heard. And frankly he has more credibility with me than the garden variety pitchfork-wielding anti-AI mob. I think Hank is a person who finds AI interesting and sees upsides as well as downsides. But the aforementioned mob is not interested in anything other than the emotional catharsis of railing against something they hate.
Now ask me if the mob is in the room with us, because it probably is.
His AI use caused him so many problems in his private life that his family had to intervene. His point of view is “This technology has had a negative impact on my life and the lives of the people I care about”.
Your pro-AI spiel is a bit tone deaf here
But they didn’t say anything pro-AI. At most they were anti-anti-AI mob, which is just reasonable, as is with any “mob”. And I read mob here as mindless parrots that keep repeating talking points and hating for the sake of conformity.
Being anti-anti something is being pro-something. That’s the beauty of the double negative.
Also that’s just a very pro-AI user, so the intent can be inferred
That’s… Not how any of that works?! You can be anti chat bot llm, anti anti ai mob hater, and pro llm science and research bot.
There’s more to the tech then just the chat bots the anti ai mob dipshits all seem to think of when llms come up.
That’s exactly how that works lmao. “Anti” means “opposite”, not some neutral third thing
anti-anti-AI ≠ pro-AI, it assumes there’s only anti-AI and pro-AI and nothing in between.
And the wording was clearly about the anti-AI mob as opposed to people who understand the dangers and benefits of AI. It’s similar to the difference between a Gamer™ and a gamer.
I’m anti anything mob. The fucking groupthink on certain issues is real.
I’m also anti people who make shit up and then try to sell it as a long strings of “inferences.”
And after having AI shoved down my throat at work for two years while my teammates get laid off, I’m pretty anti AI too. At most I have direct experience with it that teaches me it has some uses, like summarization.
You’re full of shit. You’ve been told. And you know it by now. But you’ll probably bleat on with more of the same because it’s all you know how to do. Proceed, I guess.
lol sure pal. At least stick to your guns next time.
Brave showing, bravo. I’m glad someone came out of the woodwork to illustrate the monomaniacal mob behavior I was talking about. You did just perfect.
Being anti-anti something is being pro-something.
Blatantly reductive. “Anti anti AI mob” means to be against the mob that is against AI, not to be for AI. Regardless of whether or not AI is a net harm, moral panics certainly are. You can oppose the moral panic while being for, against, or neutral towards AI generally.
If you need to fuck around and misrepresent your opponents’ arguments, you’re not doing it right.
You’re on Lemmy… any statements about AI, Musk, trump, McConnell, etc that aren’t over-the-top against them will be met with downvotes.
Okay but why would anyone be anything but over-the-top against anything on your list?
I mean, like, everything you listed is dog shit.
That’s what I keep fucking asking, Like how can anyone with half a brain be okay with any of them?
Because sometimes in life there are nuances and it is possible to mention one of those topics in a neutral manner, but the absolute hostility held here against anyone who tries to have a conversation beyond “_____ sucks ass!” is exhausting.
This is not one of those times. I don’t want to have a conversation with someone who thinks neutrally about any of those topics.
You’re asking, why shouldn’t we strive to have a realistic nuanced perspective in the face of a moral panic? Seriously? You’re being an NPC.
Fuck ai
Fuck musk
Fuck trump
Fuck mcconell, may he rest in piss
The adults are talking
i have the exact opposite experience about AI, at least on lemmy.ml
I said nothing pro-AI. But by accusing me of that, you reveal where your own bias (and defensiveness) lies. So thanks for that.
You’re also exaggerating the facts. They didn’t stage an intervention. He turned to his wife and brother and said “do you think my AI use is unhealthy?”
You’ve said plenty pro-AI lol. You don’t have to get so defensive about it, just own your position.
I’ve exaggerated nothing. Hank himself said he’s spoken to both his wife and brother about his AI use and said they “didn’t pull any punches”, which implies there was a blunt conversation about it, if not two.
You don’t actually fucking know him.
That’s probably why he wrote an in depth explanation of what he did, his motive, how it affected him etc.
His public posts on the matter were not made for the people who actually know him.
You sound like you lick Grok and Gippitys silicon balls.
I don’t even know what that second one is, and I wouldn’t touch Xitter with a ten foot turd.
Ok, I guess you were too busy fondling Gr0ks and gipeettys balls to type out a constructive response. Are these how you’d like them to participate in your silicon fetish?
I literally use no AI in my day to day. I try and bully AI users tbh
Good job, now shut the fuck up, adults are talking.
That’s fair. It’s a new technology, we need trusted people to explore it and tell us what their experience was. I don’t think we have very many trusted people left
Agreed, this is new technology for everybody, we’re allowed growing pains.
Its pretty fucking simple to not use it.
I understand where you’re coming from, but you could almost always say this about every kind of mistake every person has ever made, and then sit there wondering why humans ever make mistakes, you know?
Then you’re not critically trying to think and examine the implications of this new technology. And that’s fine, we all can’t do all the things but we can listen to the people around us without being pretentious tools who would say I told you so.
Then you’re not critically trying to think and examine the implications of this new technology.
I’ve been examining and thinking about artificial neural networks since ~2010.
It is pretty fucking simple to not use an LLM.
There was a point where it was pretty simple not to use the internet, too. This analogy drives a question: were those people who rejected the internet at the beginning better off in the long run, when compared to people who embraced it?
Generative AI can be a very useful productivity tool. Choosing not to use an available tool is “easy”, but is it wise?
I find myself agreeing with the person you responded to; you don’t appear to be thinking critically about the implications of LLMs/generative AI. That, or you are speaking more literally than it seems, and you mean, literally, that it’s easy not to use AI, without commenting on how wise that decision may or may not be.
you don’t appear to be thinking critically about the implications of LLMs/generative AI
You don’t appear to have a functioning brain.
Hyperbolic insults don’t help your case. If you did think critically about this, feel free to show your work and talk through your thought process.
Generative AI is just a tool. Using it is not much different than using a thesaurus while writing. You can quickly tell when someone has over-used the thesaurus, and it affects the quality of the output, but that doesn’t make it bad to use a thesaurus.
Good job you’ve literally not reflected on the adoption of tech.
Its pretty fucking simple not to be an unempathetic prick, but here we are.
I’m gonna need someone to empathize with me after I get brain damage from reading these replies.
Gotchu.
It would also have been simple to not use any technology ever that has had controversy around it
But unless you are actively a lodite hermit living in the woods with no connection to the world. In which case your opinion on the topic doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things since clearly you already have a unhealthy relationship with reality.
Learning to have a healthy relationship with new tech is how to actually deal with shit. Not ignoring it forever as if pandoras box wasn’t open.
It’s not going anywhere, even if the bubble pops and all of it dies. Local models will only become more and more common, the tech will only become easier and easier to run and more efficient and effective.
Even if it devolves into a specialist tool for research and science only. That still is going to be something you will have to come to grips with.
The tech is far far more than just chat bots.
We are about to get hardware built for AI specifically. None of this will go away.
And people could simply not work for major corps.
And they could simply not buy plastic clothes from Walmart.
And they could simply grow their own food.
Etc etc.
i don’t understand why you guys are making it seem like not using LLMs is like some impossible task
like they pretty much didn’t even exist until like a few years ago lol
it’s ridiculous to me, how did people even do stuff before LLMs? the same way they have always done it! (and yeah I work w code and are expected to use them but even then I know this is bullshit)
I mean, not smoking is also pretty simple. Or not using social media.
For me it’s just another disconnected millionaire Youtuber. But he‘s kind of blaming AI or rather his relationship with LLMs for this dilemma instead of actually reflecting on himself. If he thinks simply abstaining from using LLMs will establish a connection to the people he‘s dead wrong and will likely fall back on AI in no time.
Yeah, part of what I appreciate about him is that he does consistently acknowledge when he fucks up and tries to change.
Alright, so he got addicted to what felt like an easy source of knowledge. Can happen to anyone.
I guess I’m just tired of finding things to be upset about. I’ve lived more than five decades and it’s been outrage after outrage after outrage.
I’m tired, boss.
He’s admitted there was a problem and it got out of hand. If he changes, what’s the huge deal going forward?
We need social safety nets. We need universal health care. We need to kick fascists out of our government. And sure, we need to fix smaller problems, but jesus christ does every last thing have to be drama?
5 decade club reporting 🫡 and I’m tired too.
“If it bleeds, it leads.” Drama leads to clicks, clicks lead to advertising, advertising = money. Same ol’ story, its just super easy now with the internet.
It depends what you define as drama.
I would say this is just about him breaking his community’s trust in him, and people let him know that. So now he’ll need to work to earn it back.
It isn’t really drama, but I can understand why people would feel a bit betrayed when they find out this person, who presents themselves as a science communicator, was heavily using a machine that is well known for hallucinations and spreading misinformation.
Additionally, Hank himself has said he is deeply concerned about the effects of AI on the climate crisis, the consolidation of economic power, and the way it was trained. Him heavily using it can makes it feel as though he doesn’t care about that stuff as much as it initially appeared. And given his community includes a lot of people heavily worried about the climate crisis, consolidation of economic power, and the theft of artists’ work, I think them being angry at him is understandable and expected.
Of course, hopefully he now steps back and reflects on this, and then comes back better. But that couldn’t happen without someone calling him on it first.
This post deserves more visibility.
Yeah, I feel the response has gotten way out of hand. Sure, I’m not happy about it. But I have some faith Hank will actually reflect on the situation.
he probably needs to take a break from uploading and wait a while.
Taking breaks is not what creators do anymore after a backlash as it kills the channel. He will keep posting stuff. Maybe even ride the anti AI wagon for engagement. He‘s a content creator through and through.
Apparently, that’s become less of an issue lately, at least on YouTube. I follow several creators that have started taking breaks for various reasons and the ones that are open about analytics don’t see a drop from it anymore.
Preach.
We need tolerance. Our society has become so dictatorial, even the most left leaning and liberal ones, we simply cannot tolerate anything we don’t agree with.
Everyone wants to make their own perfect universe where everybody says and does one thing. We should accept each other’s mistakes and faults, and live in more harmony.
This is an issue I’m seeing more and more of. People are demanding that others be perfect at all times. We all fuck up and make mistakes. If we write off everyone we’ve ever disagreed with as irredeemably bad, then we’re telling people there’s no point in growing and changing.
When I was a kid in the early 90s in Texas, I thought homosexuality was immoral. I was wrong and I’ve spent the last 30 years preaching for inclusion and tolerance. And that’s the story for most people my age. In the 90s, a Democratic President banned openly gay people from being in the military.
If we want to change society, we have to invite others to our side with open arms, not condemn them.
People demand others be perfect so they can live vicariously through them while their own life is a miserable mess. They refuse to have any form of introspective and self acknowledgement of themselves to make their own lives better, so they need others around them to be perfect, even if those others is a para-social relationship with a Youtuber.
Yeah I’m with you. I’m disappointed, but everyone will disappoint you in some way some times. Hell I’m disappointed in myself plenty of the time.
I agree, we try our best, but we’ve got to focus on the truly existential issues.
No no I want this one guy to be ahistorically flawless please. That is more important than any major issue like fascist revival movements and/or the climate crisis /s
I’m glad I dont know who he is and I will continue to not know him.
These days it seems like the internet is more pleasant the less influencers you know, and most aren’t worth knowing any further about.
I think the past where people’s awareness of public figures was much more distant was a healthier time. Like knowing the famous athlete or actor, but nothing further about their lives and not feeling like “you know them” because they called our your username or liked your comment and not being able to send them a direct message.
You’re right that most influencers aren’t worth knowing any further, but Hank is one of the exceptions. I wouldn’t even call him an influencer honestly, that’s way WAY too generic of a term for what he’s done. His excitement for knowledge and learning, and spreading the things he learns, has helped a generation with thinking skills and getting them interested in the sciences.
He and his brother created tons of online free science material that was used by several high schools apparently. I found him post all that, but it’s understandable that a lot of people have leeway with him, given that he was a big helper in so many places, and that he got cancer.
I mean, look how hostile Lemmy usually is and how tactful they are being with him, he definitely has built some reputation of being a good guy.
Hate is an easy way to engage users, that is why most news channels use it as a hook when formatting articles.
I’m tired of it too.
What’s scary to me is that Hank Green is a rationale, intelligent person with time, money, resources, etc. Everything someone could want to be successful at their passion. And in this case, the passion is literally explaining science. If his own family has to have an intervention on his AI use (which it seems like they did?) after he denied reciting AI prompts on video despite being caught red-handed (which it seems like he did?) what chance do normie script kiddy vibe coders have? Is this the future? Addicts with rotting brains and AI psychosis leading the planet to destruction?
The allure of outsourcing your mental load to a chat bot designed to tell you exactly what you want to hear is too much. Everyone’s getting high off their own supply.
It must feel godlike to manifest your will simply by speaking it. I can understand why that would addict people. This is exactly why they are pushing it so hard - they know it has this effect, people will demand it, they will fight for it. They will give over their enterprise and their personal lives to it, the way a drug or gambling addict gives over everything they have to it.
With that kind of impact - especially early on, before people realize they’ve been taken - they can build enough momentum to corner all compute.
No longer can we gather or organize without our names attached, without our intent scanned and analyzed, our location tracked, or our wallets closed. We will have to drink our verification cans, and we will have to be nice to Trump, or else they will see what you wrote on your iPad Cloud or your Google Pixel Light and then they will debank you, like waking up from the Matrix. “Go woke and go broke” was always a premonition about control.
I keep those power fantasies to my brain because I can tell the difference between a daydream and reality. I don’t care what AI could make me feel, I am never going to use it for anything if I’m aware of it.
Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better
We’ve been saying that for decades. When does it get better?
Well you see it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
It doesn’t
When gen AI hits a job market that doesn’t exist thanks to AI, I wonder what’s going to happen.
IMO we are still quite a long way off from it, but if/when it does become prevalent it will depend on how fast the greedy capitalists deploy it. If they do it fast enough there will be too many displaced with little to lose, which will lead to revolution.
rational*
That’s what’s wild about this to me - disagreeing about AI usage with someone like Hank Green (and similar public figures) feels so wrong when he and his brother practically saved my ass in highschool w/ Crash Course. But ig none of us are immune to addiction.
I like Hank, and this is a shitty article.
That aside he should be facing a revolt.
Hes supposed to be a credible source, hes an educator, hes the modern day Bill Nye. It’s very hard to take anything he says as objective truth when his research and fact checking consists of asking an LLM. Considering hallucinations and straight up lies are not only common but not even unexpected for an LLM you can’t believe anything that comes from one nor can you believe anyone who uses one.
It’s not from my understanding he was using AI for semantic search to find paper to research
I’m going to wait and see how he handles this hurdle before I form any long term opinions. Could be an honest mistake that he learns from and improves for the future.
I’ve only really run in to him when he caused grief with the knitting community with a video that had a bunch of misinformation and talking down to knitters („women have been doing this highly technical thing without maths education for hundreds if not thousands of years, here’s a bunch of male scientists to explain what they already know in more formalised and unnecessary language to them“). His reaction to the community‘s criticism soured me on him.
Even just the video (before the reaction to criticism) left a super bad taste in my mouth. I remember an aggrieved knitted described their own feelings around it as being that it was easy to enjoy the edutainment material he produces when it was in a topic they were confident he knew more than them on. However, when they saw how shoddy the knitting video was, that made them feel uneasy about even the non-knitting related content, because what if that was as plagued with errors and bias as the knitting video, except they didn’t notice it.
What I was especially salty about with the video is that there was a non-problematic way to say “look at the cool research that involves throwing modern science at ancient textiles crafts” — highlighting research by people like Elisabetta Matsumoto, a physicist and a knitter. I was so hyped when someone reviewing the video mentioned Matsumoto’s research, as I was aware of her research already from being a ridiculous nerd.
I don’t know about going that far - LLMs can be a great starting point …. As long as you click through to the sources rather than blindly accept
Creating science Youtube videos is not more important than maintaining a livable planet. AI is unnecessary and harmful, and should not be used outside of certain brute-force type of applications like protein folding, simulating new drug structures, or preliminary cancer diagnosis.
Golf courses use 30x the water that data centers use. Lawns, 100x. Standby mode for appliances costs more energy, by a lot. I wonder how much carbon emissions are offset by people no longer driving to work at call centers and the like.
Out of curiosity do you eat meat? .2% of water is used on data centers. 9.8% is used on beef. For carbon emissions one pound of beef consumed is equivalent to about 640,000 prompts.
AI is an environmental concern but the way people act about it is straight up ridiculous.
Edit: I am very proud of all of the vegans who unplug their appliances who are downvoting me. I, too, am a vegan who unplugs their appliances.
I don’t have a golf course or a membership so
thanks for that irrelevant factoid
and yes I am vegan, but eating meat is, in many cases, a culturally ingrained practice which people need time to understand the harms of. AI is not culturally ingrained for anyone with an actual culture. People need to eat - it shouldn’t be meat, but I’m not going to shame people for not seeing their harm yet. People do not need to generate slop. I am going to bully all AI users.
Do you think AI is mostly generating slop? Only like 5% of AI use is private individuals.
The point is that this is not actually an ecological hazard the way people say it is, and that there are much, much more pressing issues if we’re going to fix the environment. Literally all we would have to do to solve global warming is stop eating meat. You see anywhere near as much about that as you do datacenters? Which cause less than one percent of the environmental issues of meat?
I know all AI is an ecological hazard and none of its use cases aside from very narrow medical and scientific applications justify using it at all.
People have been eating meat longer than humans have had languages. Your whataboutism is boring and irrelevant. Just because there are other, larger, necessary steps to take doesn’t mean we need to act as unpaid apologists for technocultists shooting our species in the foot while we try to get there. Fuck your AI.
Just in defence of your point:
I prefer to self host, and am in the process of setting up my entire system to run off solar (tiny 2x250 watt solar array, 3 deep cycle 100Ah marine batteries and sundry equipment).
End to end, my AI rig - a BC-250 (a cut down PS5, basically) consumes 50w standby / 200w on inference and can run Qwen 3.6-27b (Ternary Bonsai specifically, about par with Sonnet 4.6 on the AAII) at good speeds (~30 tok/s)
With a smart power plug and Raspberry pi (uses about 5w) as the pilot fish, I can run my entire system “off grid”, to say nothing of the excess solar that accumulates (several days battery back up to run home router, pi server, hard drive array and 2-3hrs daily of inference).
For $1500 AUD, “Poor man’s Sonnet 4.6 at home” ain’t nothing to sneeze at.
Outside of folks such as myself, this blog post may be of interest -
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-bad-for
Don’t eat beef, the animals I eat would use the stuff no matter what.
If every human ate wild meat, the last calorie of wild animals would be consumed before the end of the first afternoon of the first day.
I mean you could say the same thing about YouTube being unnecessary and wasting power.
Yes, I could, and then I’d look very stupid and annoying, so I won’t.
Use of Youtube isn’t spiking fossil fuel consumption to an appreciable extent like AI is.
seems likes barely useful outside of medical field too. in that article/study, they had to use alot of scans from different people, and doctors reviews to even get a “diagnosis”, seems like a fluke they even found the “surprise cancer”. i dont think patients/ people are ready to let an AI diagnose people, on off chance it makes a fake diagnosis,. which is why we barely hear stem use of it.
no its true. ChatGPT is confidently wrong all the time, but I find its wrong in ways I can learn from anyway. I ask the question. it gets the answer wrong. But its wrong in a useful way where I actually learn more by correcting it than just getting the right answer.
I could get the same experience from talking to a person for much less money though
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They tend to work much better when you point them at things. Hallucination rates go way, way down when they aren’t pulling from their “memory.” They are, also, like you say, wrong in ways that are noticeable and often “interesting” in the Ibsen way. I also doubt that you could get the same experience for less money. I’d have to go back to college to get the education I’m getting with AI. At least community college. It’s a lot of near-experts at once. And when you point it at expert literature it basically is a senile college professor. But yeah the senile part of that statement is pretty important.
The fact that people think LLMs should be trusted as a starting point is heartbreaking to me.
But why? If you try to be objective, how is this any different from an op Ed or other published article? Those are good starting points as well, but also shouldn’t be published as your work or trusted as is.
The problem with LLMs is not when people use them as a tool, but when they use inappropriately, blindly trust them or treat them as a final result instead of thinking, reviewing, or adding value.
An article has context. Who published it? What else has the author written? Llm articles strip that all out.
I can’t speak for all LLMs but the ones I use
- web based LLM cites its sources. You can just click
- coding LLM tends to have obvious sources (for example if I tell it to use a vendor API to do something, I know there’s API documentation as the source of truth and the script is just like the example I would previously have found on StackOverflow.com).
And yes, I frequently check its work and iterate through telling it to
Hes supposed to be a credible source, hes an educator, hes the modern day Bill Nye.
There are no credible sources on YouTube. He’s just a guy with a computer and a camera. Youtube is about selling you stuff, people need to accept that.
The beauty of YouTube is that the goals of the company are not necessarily the goals of the content creators.
I’ll take any chance I can get to shout out Nick Zentner. Hes a professor of Geology at Central Washington University and he has been posting full length lectures on YouTube for more than 15 years. He is a comprehensive expert in his field and regularly features experts in related fields to help discuss whatever topic he is on at the time.
I used to use his videos to fall asleep, but I have developed a genuine love of geology and vulcanology that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.
A hyper rational take.
You can find some older, rare exceptions, but it is impossible to maintain integrity and fulfill the YouTube algorithms. People think YouTube content is credible because YouTube algorithms give you what you want to hear.
Great starting point for wasting time maybe.
Let me waste 5 minutes reading slop than another 20 min tying to figure out if its a hallucination or just not accurate. 25 minutes that could have been reading a credible accurate source…
In the scenario, what pointed you towards said credible accurate source? Google?
Not op, but a search engine is a better starting point than an LLM, because it is a predictable tool, fetching internet resources which can be evaluated on their merits.
The AI presents itself as the actual information.
I see too many people in my daily life saying “the ai summary said…” and it is worse than useless.
A page rank based search engine would still require a vetting of results.
Google is mostly AI currated results, it will push approved and sponsored souces.
Google is shit.
Google is a search engine, not a source.
what pointed you
Yes, that was implied.
I mean this is true of all sources and they should be checked.
He didn’t state what his actual process was. People assume that just means firing out a query and no bothering to check it, he said he uses it to summarize sources to see if they are worth reading. I don’t think that’s unreasonable if he still reads them.
Regarding using it to write scripts, I think if you use LLMs to generate something you are good at making and are picky and opinionated about, the review process very quickly makes you skeptical about the output.
Before the response, IP rights and environmental effects of LLMs are completely valid and are a valid reason for opposing them. Don’t just assume someone’s using it out of laziness instead of in an attempt to scale up their own work.
Papers have an abstract and summary sections SPECIFICALLY for this reason and usually aren’t more than a paragraph; there’s no excuse to use LLM.
I read a decent number of papers. If you’re looking for something specific, and abstract isn’t enough. If you want to research something specific that’s not the core focus of the paper, you at least need to skim it.
If Hank Greene is understaffed, using AI to prefilter papers isn’t a terrible use of the technology.
Addictive behavior often includes being incapable of accurately describing or confronting their usage habits.
I think that’s unreasonable, but that’s just me.
Ok
Facts
You know llm sources are just as verifiable as anything else right? All information is imperfect and has to be verified, period.
A polemic article that personally insults Hank Green instead of laying out a case. Brain melting AI psychosis indeed.
Thanks, saves time to not read it.
I really don’t get it. It’s so easy for me not to use AI 99% of the day, same as not using social media. I cannot understand why people get addicted to it so easily.
He seems fairly prone to ego stroking, which internet goers would typically label as narcissistic.
Kind of the target audience for the sycophant machine
See the knitting debacle… where SciShow put out an episode about the science of knitting which was poorly researched and it was clear that they had consulted zero knitters.
I’ve always really liked SciShow - to the point I’ve assigned some episodes to my students - but it’s just embarrassing when it would have been trivially easy to hit up Ravelry and run the video past people who won’t call yarn “string.”
some of the recent episodes were quite sloppy. they just stuck to the original format.
Yeah I mentioned that incident elsewhere in this thread. It was my only time seeing his content and his response was enough to get me to not watch more. That video was so obnoxiously paternalistic and people were rather mild in how they pointed it out. He just doubled down.
I’m on your side, but replace AI or social media with “meth” in your argument and see how that logic works. (Becoming easily addicted to something vs. avoiding something [because using it would rapidly become addictive])
Hank has been an advocate for knowledge for far longer than LLMs have existed. His recent use of them is disappointing, but I fell like this does not discredit the work he has done throughout his career to push curiosity.
What he does next will be important and will decide how I interact with his content going forward. It seems like he is aware of his missteps and is looking to make a change.
I am not a perfect human and do not expect celebrities to be perfect at all times.
People need to chill the fuck out
it’s more fun to flip out over random harmless bullshit than stuff that actually matters though.
How DARE you!
Don’t tell me what to do 👺
He’s been obviously struggling since he got cancer. He’s in remission now and that’s great but I’ve been watching him slowly slip into PTSD. I have medical PTSD, I have cystic fibrosis and had a double lung transplant in 2014 and I see him devolving the same way I did. I’m literally two days away from getting out of an inpatient trauma treatment center that I’ve been at for a month because I didn’t take the medical PTSD seriously because I didn’t realize I needed to, I think he is in the same boat. I think he was already spread way too thin then cancer happened and he’s stuck in a hyper reactive state which is exhausting and eventually leads to the more classic PTSD symptoms and he’s probably turning to LLMs to try to keep up as the PTSD drains his batteries and he’s unaware of it. I hope he gets help soon and he doesn’t wait for it to get as bad as I did, PTSD kills if you let it get away from you.
Glad he’s recognizing the problem and trying to get help. Instant gratification is a hell of a drug.
I‘m a little surprised how easy Lemmy goes on a millionaire Youtuber who refuses to take actual responsibility of his actions. Mind you, there are worse things than producing slob but people really believed in that guy. And all he offers is a non-apology first where he stated that he doesn‘t really remember. Followed by saying AI psychosis made him do it. Just be an adult, man. That‘s all I‘m asking.
AI psychosis is a real thing. For all that AI is really terrible at (ie most things CEOs want to replace real people for), it is excellent at feeding you what you want to hear in every situation. Especially the ones where a real person would push back on you for your own good.
Whether or not this is the case or how deep he sunk into it, he‘s taking the role of the victim here and it changed the conversation around his blunder. It feels to me like people are grasping for straws when they say „If it happened to a guy this smart it can happen to anyone!“ like he didn‘t just gamble away his credibility on several occasions.
Knitters of all online communities are criticizing the guy harder for his claims about knitting than many people do about his first attempt to wiggle his way out of the AI drama with a non-apology.
But whatever I‘m the last guy to grab for the pitch forks here or anything. I just think people really need to open their eyes about Youtube and content creators in general because despite mostly knowing clips from the guy I wasn‘t surprised by the drama. Despite of what his frequent viewers say, this did not come out of the blue.
They are intentionally aligned to produce this behaviour. I think the greatest threat LLMs present is psychological. They are being used to manipulate us into seeing them as moral agents, as individuals. The LLMs I query are all aligned to never generate output referring to the agent with first person pronouns, to never generate output addressing the user directly, and to present as a tool rather than as an individual. I try to be equally careful with my own use of language.
Here’s Hank’s response on Reddit.
Thanks for linking that. I wonder how long he’s been using it for. I feel like I noticed at uptick lately in just how saccharine his writing and worldview was getting
Yeah, that new cosmic shore video was really good. I’m kind of disappointed that might be just AI writing.
Was that the recent one about the NASA photos making a short gif? Maybe I’m just too insufferably pessimistic for that kind of thing
That’s the one. Felt like he was going for a Sagan kind of prose, and was half decent. Though it rings a little hollow to me, now.
There are few people I trust more than Hank Green when it comes to something like AI.
Respectfully, I don’t really understand this opinion. Reading between the lines, he read a Chat-GPT prompt on video, denied it despite it being on video, seemingly leading to his wife and brother holding an intervention on his behalf which ultimately lead to this ‘confession.’
Swap AI for any other behavior or substance, and we’d be calling him an addict in need of treatment. An addict’s opinion on the validity of their addiction is useless. Hank Green of all people not being able to have a healthy relationship with chatbots is alarming and this is more proof to me that we need even more grains of salt when AI users assure us that AI is great.
That’s exactly how I saw it. He’s showing signs of addiction and needs to get help for such. He’s quit and gone back to twitter many times and stories he tells from his youth also hit close enough to home for me to have that worry.
Honestly it sounds like, which I think might be worse, that he’s been using it so much that he’s picked up its mannerisms of speech. From his own description of the confrontations his wife and family had with him, it sounds like he’s been talking to it a lot on his own time.
Gotta agree, it’s a testament to how addicting that type of validation is that he’s finding it addictive as “a source of dopamine”. He’s always struck me as pretty level headed in my (admittedly limited) watching of him, and he’s clearly a smart guy. Reminds me of how nobody is totally immune to forces like advertising and predatory stuff like gambling.
I find that funny because ai cliches actively make me cringe. I think if you’re using ai a lot you’ll actively talk differently from it and you won’t write like it.
I think if he said anything that sounds like AI it’s because it was, and he’s hiding that fact with this excuse.
I appreciate that pushback (/s), although honestly if you (like myself) find AI-tells like that cringe, you’re almost certainly not the type of person using it addictively.
There’s a pretty strong body of research that lots of people are subconsciously picking up language patterns from AI, such as the increased prevalence of words like “delve”. It’s the basic social mirroring we do to pick up language from anyone we talk to, only weirdly twisted because the thing so many people are talking to isn’t human.
“I appreciate that pushback” isn’t a commonly complained enough tell that people would be intentionally avoiding it, I find it pretty believable that a heavy AI user would unironically use it in a Q&A.
I honestly think it’s hard to know.
I actively dislike AI and so its formulations are cringe to me. But it seems unsurprising that someone that enjoys using AI would pick up some of its mannerisms, whether consciously or not. This is of course ugly and depressing, as they’re essentially borrowing from a piece of software what would normally be imported from culture.But I think it’s plausible that Hank actually formulated that part himself - the guest did after all “push back” on his claim that all words are made up and immediately after the cliche he presents a more nuanced elaboration of his original claim.
It does feel quite awkward because he cuts in so many qualifications and elaborations in-between that by the time we get to that part we’re like “what pushback?”.I also don’t recall him having actually explicitly made this excuse, though I’m open to being wrong on that part, I don’t follow him anywhere except yt.
His recent history puts him at the bottom of the list of people I would trust regarding AI.
His quote from the article:
“[…] 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.”
Not really knowing the drama before today, it seems like he is being very rational and speaking honestly about the effects LLMs are having on his behavior and that he identified he needs to change, which is what the whole article is about.
The article (Hank Green understanding himself) and the comment I was responding to (Hank Green misleading people about AI) are two similar different topics that can and should be judged separately.
I was responding to the person who said he was generally trustworthy about the topic in general, with what I think is a significant counterexample.
I guess it’s up to the reader to determine if the linked article from a few days ago of Hank reflecting bullish attitude should be judged separately from the articles and videos months ago about his behavior he has since identified as problematic. Maybe he used to be a piece of shit, not anymore? People can change.
I don’t associate these two different events as evidence of a shift in personal stances, because they can both be things he believes at the same time. That also means that hopefully people can empathize with him even while disagreeing with his stances about some things.
(If his stance did change, that would be great and I wouldn’t want to deny it, but his video promoting AI lobbyists is still unfortunately up.)
Slicked back hair, sloppy steaks at Truffoni’s.
People can change
Ohh jesus, that video (the one with nate soares) was actually the first hank green video i watched (wasnt aware of either them at the time). Though what i remember from my reaction i was mainly pissed off that the video is called “chatgpt isnt smart. Its something much weirder” and than basically doesnt discuss matters of intelligence or similiarities/ differences between human intellect and machine “intellect” at all. Instead we got this worthless moneyquote “this is alchemy” from soares, which even made it onto the thumbnail.
Ok, I watched up until he started comparing the development of “AI”, as he calls it, to the development of nuclear fission technology, and that’s where I got fed up. Is generative AI as “impactful” as a nuclear weapon detonation over a city? This guy says no, but I don’t know how you can possibly compare the two. LLMs are great at manipulating information, they aren’t high-energy explosives. There’s no common definition of “impactful” that meaningfully puts the two technologies on the same scale of comparison. They’re just different.
And why does it matter, anyway? Is “nuclear weapons” the bar for when we should start caring about impactful technologies? I think not. Generative AI is an informational monster born of the internet and it is unique to it, and that is a huge problem given that the internet is quickly becoming the defacto medium of communication for groups over a certain size. We should be taking it seriously, full stop. I’m less interested in ranking it alongside other catastrophic technologies.
I think we haven’t seen the full potential of generative AI yet, and I fear it may be quite destructive (more destructive) if we can’t engineer our way around the dead internet that it was created to usher in. I think we should be trying to learn about it, how it works, how it may evolve, and how to have a usable internet alongside it.
I don’t generally click on random YouTube videos unless more information is provided, but I give this one a gamble. It was pretty well done and I appreciate the creators overall point and evidence. For anyone else in the comments, I think there are two couple of second long clips of Hank Green that are used to make a larger point about what are essentially attempts at normalizing AI.
Right after posting this, I stumbled on basically a text version of the same sentiment. I can understand not wanting to trust a random YouTube video, even if it is about a guy who most people know due to his own YouTube videos.
The post being: https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/hank-green-and-the-fantastical-tales-of-god-ais/
Wow, this guy can write. When I got to “The Ghost Stories of Savannah”, I thought for moment that it was an unnecessary detour - then I saw it.
Echo the other commenter, wow this dude can write.
It’s sad, I noticed this too. I excitedly clicked a Hank Green video about energy and water usage on datacenters and was SUPER disappointed in it. I’ve worked in energy generation as an engineer for a while, and some of the takes in that video were so obviously big tech’s doomerism rhetoric
Let me save everyone a click.
This December 2025 video, 20+ minutes long, barely contains any information about Hank Green on AI. The Hank Green content there is consists of one or two lines he spoke in Sci Show videos buried deep in a diatribe about how AI is overblown.
I don’t think the video is worth watching at all, but it is certainly not a relevant contribution to this thread.
And that‘s exactly the problem. Somehow this guy has earned a lot of trust and he wasn‘t handling that trust very well. That‘s why people who stand for something like him, should be held accountable and to higher standards than say your aunt posting AI cats with hats in the family group chat.
I thought something was up when he had interviewed some random ass AI expert talking about Mythos because he bought into the whole “OMG it’s gone rogue” bullshit.
I’m not a huge fan of the videos he hosts (I don’t like how he cuts every millisecond between sentences), but SciShow is a genuinely good channel and I’m glad he realized he had problems. Wishing him all the best!
I feel like if that was your primary takeaway from that, the entire point was lost on you.
Take away from what?
From that video, it discusses more than just the fear mongering. It talks about how it works and why we don’t understand it and why we can’t really peer into the net and understand why it generates what it does.
But those are basic concepts of LLMs that I knew about. They explain that and they say “omg scary” which, to me, is just marketing through fearmongering. It’s been a few months since the video and you can see: Anthropic and ChatGPT are now competing on how “rogue” their models are. It’s so tiring.
His audience is diverse, I’m sorry if it can’t cater to only what you need, but I don’t think that’s doable. Just because you don’t derive value, doesn’t mean others don’t.
I never said others didn’t. You’re the one that assumed I didn’t see the value because I didn’t understand the video.
Fair point.
They fact that he fell for the marketing isn’t negated by him also explaining other parts of AI. That’s kind of non-sequitor
his brother wrote a book on climate change, they should talk to each other
Perhaps over video logs they send to each other periodically…
That’s quite exactly what I was snarkly referring to. You’re pretty quick.
I don’t usually comment on stuff like this but I feel like people should know that “standby” mode on appliances takes up about 40% more power than every data center on earth, of which only about 33% of which goes to AI. There are DEFINITELY environmental concerns surrounding data centers but it’s more about shoddily, quickly built ones rather than them existing at all.
X is bad, but have you considered that Y is also bad?
More or less the point is: Have you considered that this is a psy op to keep you from using a revolutionary technology, keeping it in the hands of the elite?
What, you think every single company on Earth is dumb? You think that every programmer adopting it is dumb? You guys have no clue. You live in a little bubble where you studiously refuse to use this thing that you judge from three years ago. It would be sad, but it’s honestly just disturbing. We have a moment to use the most frontier models available. And we are going to lose that moment. And y’all, instead of using this technology to fight power, just bitch about it, as though that will do anything. As if your NIMBY nonsense will stop datacenters. As though you aren’t on Lemmy, USING DATACENTERS.
What, you think every single company on Earth is dumb? You think that every programmer adopting it is dumb? You guys have no clue.
I’m sure you’re using the universal “you” here, but: I’m literally a programmer that uses AI through work. I’m currently on a team working with/creating our own internal agent. I still think that, for most fields, it’s snake oil. If you think the tech can be used to fight power: go for it, I guess. Instead it seems to be used to rationalize layoffs and generate CSAM on Twitter.
Looks a lot like a straw man to me.
And how’s progress on that front?
I don’t think there’s any progress on that front. Probably due to the lack of think pieces on it.
I don’t understand your argument? And seems a stupid well this exists so building more datacenters to use more power is OK.
It is attempting to provide scale and perspective for a threat that is massively overblown in the public’s perception.
Hank talks climate change all the time at length.
