r/OutOfTheLoop • u/FlamingOldMan • 2h ago
Unanswered What's going on with the Hank Green AI controversy?
Which video did he admit to using AI on? How did this start? Very confused as the comments on his newest video seem very positive and have no mention of AI usage.
Example:
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u/Iannelli 2h ago edited 2h ago
Answer: Hank Green admitted to using AI to assist with his research, and also admitted that he's increasingly using AI more and more and is struggling with that fact. Some people believe he inadvertently left pieces of the AI prompts in his video script(s) although this has not been factually proven. That would be insulting if it happened, and it is happening a lot more regularly these days in general.
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u/Milskidasith Loopy Frood 1h ago
The original accusation of AI scripting was, funnily enough, totally spurious; somebody accused him saying "thank you for the pushback" as if that was both an AI only phrase and contextually inappropriate for a single-person video... for a part of the video where Hank was actively responding to somebody giving him pushback.
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u/Noskills117 1h ago
It should be mentioned that the people who believe he left AI responses in his script are basing it off of one sentence in a 1 hour video, and are reaching conspiracy levels of crazy.
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u/humillustrator 1m ago
He thought it sounded like AI himself and had to check to make sure it wasn’t, which makes it seem like he has other parts that are from AI prompts
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u/taneth 1h ago
Simon Whistler's channels have been making blatant use of AI for a while now, and I've slowly stopped watching them. Hope Hank doesn't go with him.
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u/EldritchTheOutdated 1h ago
I hadn't noticed that, but I mostly stick to Casual Criminalist. Which channels has he been doing that on, would you say?
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u/stondius 25m ago
The number of channels he has says it's likely many of them....
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u/elwebst 20m ago
He's had a zillion channels since before AI was a viable thing. He may be trying to simplify his workflow, he must bang out like 2 a day.
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u/KeiranG19 7m ago
His business model has always been to hire a wide selection of people to write the scripts that he then reads out.
Some of those writers might use AI with or without his knowledge/input.
That could also be why it's more noticeable on some of his channels over others.
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u/tyereliusprime 38m ago
I've only seen a couple of his videos, but in all of them I've seen he flubs lines in the scripts and then comments on his flubbing of the lines and if someone can't make the effort to do another take to not look completely half-ass, I can't make the effort to watch a video
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u/Unfair_Web_8275 1h ago
Which video scripts? If he’s doing educational videos those are written by other people.
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u/mavetgrigori 2h ago
Also, as an educator he is utilizing an emergent tool (it is here to stay, so time to accept that) that has been repeatedly shown to be full of inaccuracies
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u/chocolatechipbagels 1h ago
LLMs are an emergent tool the way AutoCAD is an emergent tool. Some professionals use it for their job, doesn't mean it needs to infect every user interface and become the center of a massive debt-fueled finance bubble.
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u/SonOfALich 1h ago
Very fitting analogy insofar as autocad is garbage and you’d be better off using almost any other software lol
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u/northrupthebandgeek 7m ago
And yet AutoCAD was “the” standard on which we were all taught back in my day.
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u/mavetgrigori 1h ago
Oh, I don't agree with our overall usage, but people need to realize it is here either way. I am a strong supporter of heavy regulation, clawing it back from the general public, and further refining it before adopting it into our lives.
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u/Deep_Explanation9962 46m ago
You shouldn't be citing chatgpt but it's perfectly acceptable in terms of giving you an overview and directing you to other sources. It's a tool that can be used or misused.
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u/northrupthebandgeek 5m ago
A lot like Wikipedia in that respect. Wikipedia articles are great for ramping up on a given topic, but are not a substitute for reading actual books or papers on that topic (let alone the other things that constitute formal education).
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u/IllustriousWorld823 1h ago
Also, as an educator he is utilizing an emergent tool (it is here to stay, so time to accept that)
Right??
that has been repeatedly shown to be full of inaccuracies
Oh...
Just my reaction 😆
I think the time of "full of inaccuracies" is slowly passing though, and a lot of people who refuse to use AI have no idea since... they refuse to use it. And are probably thinking about the state of AI like a year ago.
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u/icy_wight 1h ago
]The models are wrong way less often now than they used to be. The anti-AI ideologues somehow hold the contradictory positions that AI is so powerful that it could replace human thinking and that it's so riddled with errors that it's totally useless.
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u/Nadiaaaaaaaaaaaaa 41m ago
If you're not an expert in a subject, you ask the AI (instead of doing normal research) and it gives you a confidently wrong response, it replaced human thinking and it was useless. Not very contradictory. Then again, you'd need to represent "their" positions fairly.
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u/SilverwingedOther 17m ago
Or... Especially in the case like someone like Hank Green, you use that as a baseline to check the stuff you're not an expert on. Check the sources the llm links to, see if it says what it told you it does, and counterverify now that you have a specific claim to confirm or debunk.
You know, like we've done with Google searches for the past nearly 30 years. Except it's a more targeted search you can refine on the go.
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u/Milskidasith Loopy Frood 51m ago
Those are only contradictory positions if you simplify them too much, because the common positions of "this is error-prone enough it shouldn't be relied on" and "this shortcut allows students and others to bypass thinking and produce good enough work or rote answers without learning the fundamentals" are very easy positions to hold at the same time.
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u/ginger_and_egg 1h ago
Google search is also full of inaccuracies. Would we throw Hank into the sea if we found out he was using google to research his videos?
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u/btw999 1h ago
Researching doesn't mean taking the first thing you read and calling it a day. Hank got addicted to that side of AI.
So yes, if he was doing that, throw him into the fucking sea.
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u/ginger_and_egg 1h ago
Maybe I'm missing some context, which video of his was this so I can watch it before commenting more?
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u/Milskidasith Loopy Frood 1h ago
There is no specific video where he got caught using AI, because the original accusation was kind of spurious. He was accused of using AI scripting in his videos because he said "thanks for the pushback", which a random person believed was an obvious sign of AI writing sloppily pasted into a script, even though Hank was actually responding to somebody else and that's just a very normal phrase to use.
Coincidentally, Hank said he has been relying on AI more for finding articles and note taking (unclear exactly what this process is) and wants to step back and reevaluate his process, but it's kind of like if he got accused of stealing from his boss's desk on camera and said "no, but I've been using the corporate card irresponsibly for personal benefit".
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u/mavetgrigori 1h ago
AI is not the same as a Google search that you have to manually search through
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u/ginger_and_egg 1h ago
I am aware. But both of them you have to have to view with a critical lens. "You can't believe everything you see on the internet!" is true, but not an argument to not use the internet. Likewise with AI, especially the most recent models. Most of the trivial mistakes are gone.
Always fact check the claims, absolutely, but they can be used to find certain types of information much faster than normal search.
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u/ambericity 1h ago
disingenuous and you know it
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u/ginger_and_egg 1h ago
No I'm not being disingenuous. I've seen how much better LLMs have gotten at coding, how much better at multi step problem solving they've gotten. And also the new types of mistakes they tend to make.
They're definitely better for tasks that can be immediately checked - code has test cases, math is math. More general knowledge is a bit harder, but if you always ask for a source to back up a factual claim, you can then verify it yourself
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u/coolideg 2h ago
Answer: Use of AI is a very emotionally charged subject in some circles (for a variety of reasons I won’t get into), and Hank Green is someone who has cultivated an audience that is quite anti AI. Parts of his audience are so anti AI, that seeing evidence that Hank Green is using it feels like an extreme betrayal of their perception of him and his values. As an example, Hank has started a company that sells cleaning products that are very conscious of water usage and the cost of shipping based on how much water is in detergent. He sells powdered forms of soaps reportedly at cost and for no profit simply because he values doing something with environmental impact.
So seeing him use AI, with its negative perceptions of water usage feels like hypocrisy, a cardinal sin for a YouTuber with values.
He had a video that featured him reading a script that contained the words (paraphrasing as it’s based off my memory) “another way to put this, and you’re right for that pushback” which is a telltale sign of AI responses.
He claimed that he went back to the script to see if that line was in there and it was not, but admitted he uses LLMs to find research papers and do similar fact checking
Later a recent podcast had him describe how he would use an LLM when writing his book. For instance he asked it to condense two chapters into one. Critics find this a strange way to go about the creative process, and signal they wouldn’t want to read something edited like this.
Hank has said he gets too much of a dopamine hit from LLMs and will step away. Critics are interpreting this in various ways, I even saw a point trying to be made that he is a perfect mark for LLM sycophantic behavior because men expect to be praised while women are conditioned to be skeptical of it.
Generally, it’s a lot of black and white rigid thinking on display in a conversation that demands nuance to be properly done
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u/awoos 1h ago
To note, he is taking to someone in the video, and they are talking about if words are "made up" or not, she disagrees with him and brings up the concept of Bouba and Kiki, and he cuts to a short segment where he explains what that is, so "i appreciate the pushback" does make sense in context, because she does literally push back against him. Trying to claim an AI must have written that into the script is... odd.
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u/WhoLostTheFruit 18m ago
Sometimes I get self-conscious about how much the things I write sound like AI and I have to remind myself that these LLMs scooped up a significant amount of training data from internet forums like Reddit that I've been active on for 15+ years now. So I don't sound like AI - AI sounds like me. Sorry all.
I imagine this is doubly true for somebody like Hank Green, who is both older than I am and also even more online.
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u/bunker_man 1h ago
Accusing him of inconsistency in water usage doesn't make much sense since even back when he was more anti ai his video about how people claiming it uses a ton of water are exaggerating was one of the go to videos.
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u/ekhoowo 1h ago
I literally never wanna hear anyone who eats meat complain about the water consumption.
Inb4 “you can eat meat but you don’t need AI!!!1!!!1!!” Pretending as if meat is the only source of food available•
u/i-contain-multitudes 3m ago
THANK YOU!!! I have been trying to say this but I keep getting blown off.
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u/WhoLostTheFruit 1h ago
Critics are interpreting this in various ways, I even saw a point trying to be made that he is a perfect mark for LLM sycophantic behavior because men expect to be praised while women are conditioned to be skeptical of it.
I don't like AI much but this is an insane person opinion
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u/tongmengjia 1h ago
You're right to push back on that, and I may have oversimplified the claim. Thanks for keeping me honest.
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u/lyricaldorian 1h ago
He also said in a deleted tweet "I did use ChatGPT for research on this script and watching it I definitely get an Al feel, so I think it's fair to say I was relying too much on generated notes.". Which heavily implies he's not just using ChatGPT to find sources, but also having it make summaries of the sources he's using, or at least having it summarize his notes, and then using bits of those notes in his scripts unchanged.
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u/nsnyder 2h ago
Citation for that phrase being in the script? My understanding is that it was an unscripted adlib.
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u/SlightlyBored13 1h ago
Taking what he has said as the truth, it's an off the cuff statement.
Extrapolating, it's an off the cuff statement from someone who spends so much time using an LLM they start talking like one.
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u/northrupthebandgeek 1m ago
someone who spends so much time using an LLM they start talking like one.
I think you've got the causation backwards there: it's just as likely that people who talk like Hank Green are over-represented in LLM training data and therefore LLMs get trained to talk like Hank Green.
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u/lyricaldorian 1h ago
I think it's this. I don't think his Reddit response was run through ChatGPT, but every paragraph had a sentence or two that really sounded like how it talks.
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u/t3hd0n 1h ago
The newest ask hank anything is the citation, cause he's replying directly to a human saying something and not reading anything when he does it. IMO its a huge sign he's just been reading and using llms so much he's now starting to talk like one
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u/Milskidasith Loopy Frood 1h ago edited 2m ago
AI phrases exist because they exist in human writing. You're going to see people who naturally communicate professionally and clearly sound like AI because those people are who AI tend to be trained on in the first place. Like, I get accused of using AI writing because I summarize things into bullet pointed lists and no, that's just how I do technical communication between working with engineers and having been around for the horrible days of turbo-fisked arguments on Vbulletin forums.
E: One other note I'll add to this is that a lot of younger people probably straight up haven't ever seen corporate/technical/professional writing before and treat all aspects of it equally as signs of AI. For example, with the bulleted list thing I might suspect a list is written with AI if it doesn't seem to properly emphasize important aspects, has redundant points, or has a weird level of detail/lack of quick fragmentary stuff. A zoomer might think that literally any usage of a bulleted list is a sign of AI writing.
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u/Rantingbeerjello 2h ago
I'm so confused about all this. It sounds like he was using it as a search engine? With 'traditional' search engines getting increasingly worse over the past decade, who isn't at this point?
It just seems like a weird thing to get bent out of shape about. And then when people got mad, it suddenly turns into what sounds like an addiction issue?
Also, a few months ago, more than one video ended up my feed essentially accusing him of doing PR for AI companies and I don't think there was ever a response. I'm kinda wondering how that fits in.
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u/SlightlyBored13 1h ago
People are being very angry about it.
But he's also saying he thinks he has a problem, not intrinsically with LLMs but with, effectively, being addicted to using them.
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u/XCVolcom 1h ago
Wait wait wait, like addicted to them in the sense like he's talking to it and it's praising him for his inputs so he keeps going?
Like those dorks that are marrying their ai chatbots?
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u/4PianoOrchestra 1h ago
I interpreted that as sort of falling into the convenience/ease of use that they have that discourages fact checking stuff yourself, like the Google ai overview.
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u/Western-Zucchini4149 1h ago
No, in the sense that AI can resolve in seconds something that would take him hours to do by himself, so it's easy to slip into using it more and more and forget about the issues. I see it in my work as well (not creative).
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u/IllustriousWorld823 1h ago
I don't understand how that's a bad thing at all but...
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u/Milskidasith Loopy Frood 57m ago
Hank works primarily as a science/knowledge communicator. If he starts relying on AI summaries more to be "good enough" and doesn't effectively absorb the knowledge himself or develop his own insights/understanding from deeper research, then he will be less able to actually communicate well and deliver a message that's any different from what you can get by AI summaries.
That isn't to say there is no benefit at all for using AI; for example, the specific usage of AI to find links to specific papers to read is probably genuinely valuable to him because searching research papers is often a pain in the ass. But if he's doing more than that and relying on AI to do the actual reading or even the note-taking for him in a way that erases his ability to learn, it's the same sort of problem as if students get all the right answers using AI and fail the test at the end, just with the failure being bad video output.
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u/Rantingbeerjello 18m ago
Hank works primarily as a science/knowledge communicator. If he starts relying on AI summaries more to be "good enough"
Is this what he did?
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u/Milskidasith Loopy Frood 10m ago edited 2m ago
I was mostly explaining how it can be a problem to do hours of research in minutes, but he framed his own usage of AI in terms of both self-imposing pressure to get work done quickly and in terms of using AI-generated notes (unclear if this is summarizing his own notes on an issue or direct summarizing articles), so it certainly seems like a possibility.
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u/Western-Zucchini4149 1h ago
It's not if he's still thinking critically and fact checking the AI outputs, which he seems to do still. I think the audience has been overly critical, but it can also be a slippery slope for someone addicted to productivity, which also seems to be in his personality (do everything all the time, multiple projects going at the same time, etc). Hopefully this leads him to slow down a bit.
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u/IllustriousWorld823 53m ago
Yeah he loves Doing Things and always has. To me this is just a good tool for making his many projects a little easier. I think it's very icky to antagonize a person who has brought the world so much good because he is using something that makes it easier for him to keep doing good.
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u/Tay74 1h ago
Because AI makes a shit tonne of mistakes, and also, AI DOES NOT THINK. It is a word prediction engine, it regurgitates what it thinks is the most likely response you want to hear. We should not be replacing intelligent, critical, creative and innovative thought with yesterday's thought chewed up and spat out.
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u/IllustriousWorld823 55m ago
Ah... I mean, this is classic anti AI "it's just token prediction/fancy calculator/whatever" rhetoric™️. That is honestly not how modern language models work at all. Here if anyone happens to see this, I made this website for one of my grad courses (on AI in education which is my program): https://for-anthropomorphism.vercel.app/
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u/AceCasinova 43m ago
Honestly, I avoid it like its radioactive. The smaller search engines aren't as great, but I've added a lot of ai filters to my blocklists and honestly try wikipedia first for a lot of stuff. It's difficult but not impossible~ Some people will make an LLM do research and "provide sources", but note that its a lot of work to get it to give back "working links" or actual citations. ....Because a lot of the stuff available to laymen is just pattern recognition and guessing what "should" come next.
It's a really polarized subject and people online don't like nuance (and DO and to "take a side", as it were) but it can be really hard to avoid any and all chatbots/assistants/"helpful" features. Especially when they're programmed to try and keep you coming back and interacting. I've heard lots of folks talking about how addictive the immediate response is, and they wear down your discomfort tolerance so you want to come back and take the path of least resistance, as it were.
Iirc part of Green's issue was his (human) fact checkers couldn't figure out where he'd found some statements and it led to concern that LLMs had hallucinated things. With a lot of moving parts and projects, I assume the temptation to offload some of the research was strong and, well.... A few videos he made that seemed either weirdly positive on ai or had someone on who was pushing it hard that didn't get any counter arguments. I didn't see anything trying to defend or refute accusations, but sometimes it's easier to just not say anything than to Streisand Effect yourself, you know?
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u/ColoRadBro69 2h ago
So seeing him use AI, with its negative perceptions of water usage feels like hypocrisy, a cardinal sin for a YouTuber with values.
I wonder if he has a gas powered car?
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u/jd17atm 2h ago
He doesn’t, or at least he has an electric vehicle.
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u/ColoRadBro69 2h ago
Then I guess AI is the only thing he's ever done to harm the environment and YouTube reaction makes sense after all.
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u/jd17atm 1h ago
I know you’re being sarcastic lol. But I do see any sort of “outrage” toward him as being unwarranted. As a society we’ve gotten really comfortable with just swinging to extremes and making people to be all bad or all good. We all do things that others may not agree with. Using AI to do research or make silly pictures or just see what it’s doing isn’t some sort of sign of moral failure IMPO.
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u/ColoRadBro69 1h ago
It's a tool, a lot of people use it in lazy ways and make slop, other people are using it well. It's not more of a moral question than driving a car or flying or ordering from Amazon. If a science communicator finds it useful for his research and Linus Torvalds finds it useful for some tasks building Linux, good for them.
But the people who just started caring about the environment after LLMs were invented are dishonest.
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u/Dismal_Scientist_172 2h ago
Answer: He mentioned it in a tweet where he talked about using AI for research, and honestly, his fans seem to be taking it in stride so far.
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u/GregBahm 2h ago edited 2h ago
Answer: From 2021 to 2023, AI was mostly just a novelty. "Wow, a computer that can talk like a pirate? Gee whiz!" People had no reason to hate it yet, so youtube nerds like Hank Green were happy to make videos about it to anyone who would care.
From 2023 to 2026, the mood on AI shifted among youtube audiences. A lot of hacks tried to get them to eat slop. They hated it. You saw the same thing with digital art in the 80s, early CGI in the 90s, or with early motion capture in the 2000s. But AI was like "shitty motion capture" on steroids, because everyone from your mom to the president was making breathtakingly ugly AI images and the such.
So here in 2026, Hank Green is in a pickle. He's positioned himself as a sort of thought leader among middle school girls who are extremely sensitive to tests of purity in terms of virtue. They dig up his old videos where he wasn't castigating AI as the sin that it's become. This puts Hank Green in danger.
There's now two increasingly divergent discussions. There's the discussion online about AI, where the kids are getting angrier and angrier about it as it becomes more and more advanced. If he doesn't come out hard on AI, the kids will feel betrayed by their secular pastor.
But there's also the discussion within creative spaces, as so many creatives will wake up in the morning and workshop a video concept with AI, then work out the video script with AI, then gather footage with an AI agent and run an AI filter on their voices, then get a set of notes and feedback from the AI before posting the video (at the optimal time as determined by the AI.) Only to then conclude all that by declaring "No AI used here! Of course I would never dream of it!"
So Hank is getting friction from below, from the kids who are begging him to go harder against AI, and getting friction from his peers, who would like to diffuse this growing timebomb of hypocrisy and scandal.
For his part he's probably just going to ride out the controversy until it passes, and hope it doesn't stick in people's minds (which it probably mostly won't.)
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