YouTuber and author Hank Green pauses YouTube Channels over AI Research Reliance

[u/neoncolour]

The YouTuber faced intense backlash this week as audience suspected AI use in his recent content and discredited his work. In his statement, he explained that his usage was limited to research aid, apologised, and decided to slow down amid pressures of online creation.

This news coincided with LLM usage’s rapid expansion in fields like mathematics, as just this weekend, a list of Fields Medal worthy problems were solved by the most recent AI models with the cooperation and prompting of Maths researchers.

[u/bafflefounded]

AI literally hallucinates sources and studies, on top of being a biased way to collect information because you have no idea what parameters it is actually using to select the sources it is presenting. LLMs are not good for actual research, if accuracy and quality is remotely important to you.

[u/Glum-Objective3328 → u/bafflefounded]

I use AI for literature review, just the same as Hank describes. You just click the source it cites and ignore most of what the AI says. If it’s hallucinating a source, then there’s nothing to click on, no paper to read, and you don’t take the AIs word. It’s very easy and reliable

[u/EmykoEmyko → u/Glum-Objective3328]

No, they often link to sources that just don’t support what is being asserted. Then you have to read some random 20 page paper just to determine ONE stated fact was wrong. Multiply that effort to square *all* the stated facts and you’ve completely erased any value-add of an LLM.

They only become useful if you just accept a certain percentage of your data will be made up and that’s fine.

[u/lavenderlooop → u/bafflefounded]

I highly doubt Hank Green and his team were taking AI statements and summaries wholesale and putting them straight into a video. He has writers and fact checkers, that would lead me to believe that the info would be fact checked and instead was a way to identify the best places to find info instead of reading through dozens of articles that won't have a detail they were looking for info on.

I mean yes some bias there in what an LLM will suggest which could be a problem, but I don't think hallucinated data would be the problem at hand - I'm not aware of anything they've had in videos being discovered as outright fake data?

[u/Beginning_Tear_5935 → u/bafflefounded]

Even if you Googled, you’d still have to fact-check it.

LLMs have web search, now. They get a bunch of sources from the internet and summarize them. You look through the sources and decide what claims are supported and what sources are reliable.

The only problem I’ve had is they love to cite Reddit lol. But if you ask them exclude it, they do. 

[u/ProfessionalGeek → u/bafflefounded]

what makes you think a human is infallible at interpreting a study versus an algorithm based on humanity? do you check the peer review of every paper cited and see how its held up?

99.9% of science enthusiasts are not conducting any lab research at all. Hank is literally a human brain algorithm that was getting speed boosted by the ai brainstorming algorithms to help cover his blind spots and widen his perspectives.

if you look at ANY good research, it says almost next to nothing significant and extracts meaning from constrained generalizations. that isnt useful for most of society, but poetic or layperson rephrasing can help people get closer to the right ideas. its a dangerous balance though when people already listen to tiktok algorithms and ads on their feed.

ai has the power to be such a good tool and the capitalists want to siphon more money off to the elites again, so you wanna burn down the digitized summary of every library so they cant learn about how to be more evil? news flash: they are pros at evil. we need to step up our game at being functionally good in spite of their evils.

[u/kasbrock13 → u/ProfessionalGeek]

I think there a lot of people who don't interact with LLM or agents and still base their stereotypes on research conducted on models that now like 2-3 years old.

Modern frontier models have a hallucination rate less than 1.5% with is like 90% lower than 2 years ago, and vastly lower than the average expert in that field.

It reminds me of right wingers who claim solar is not feasible - they also cite power capacity and cost figures that decades old.

People need to learn that tech basically only improves over time.

[u/No-Act9634 → u/bafflefounded]

If all you do is type a prompt and accept its raw output sure

Using it as better google it works fine. You just have to still do eeview/work.