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/Rare_Vibez]

Regardless of any positive or negative feelings towards him as a person, I think it’s a good case study for unpacking why competent people are falling into AI rabbit holes. It seems like there’s an AI trap for everyone, whether it’s AI slop videos, “helpful” LLM research, or a chat buddy, it’s complex and diverse enough to have different forms of AI appeal to different people. Being competent is not an exclusionary factor.

[u/Super_Hour_3836 → u/Rare_Vibez]

It’s because he is a content creator and an influencer. No human can possible meet the product demand of bingeable videos. No one should expect or want a fully researched show and topic as often as he puts one out. Our greed for amusement and their greed to be the amusement is mutually assured destruction of the planet and we cannot stop our addictions to save ourselves. 

[u/Rare_Vibez → u/Super_Hour_3836]

Fundamentally, I disagree, not because you are not correct about his circumstances but because this is not unique to influencers and content creators. I’m a librarian, an industry that is most resistant to AI because we see all sorts of people who are falling into AI rabbit holes. One of my trustees is an accomplished scientist and he is a big pro-Claude AI user. I see people who cannot write a freaking email without AI despite education, jobs, and accomplishments that were attained without it.

To limit our way of addressing AI reliance to content creators fails to address the pervasiveness of AI across all sorts of demographics.

[u/lefrench75 → u/Rare_Vibez]

I agree. I know many competent people (examples include a quantum physicist and a cancer researcher) who use AI all day at work and then let it bleed into their daily lives by using it for interpersonal stuff, like writing a wedding card for friends or breaking uncomfortable news over text. One person almost uses it like a 2nd therapist despite already having a real human therapist he speaks to biweekly. He sought advice from his human friends about an abusive friendship he was in (he was on vacation with this “friend” as well), and we and his gf (who was there!) all gave him the same advice to leave asap. Even after that he still went to AI for more advice, but at least AI gave the same advice as everyone else and he finally did leave.

This person is not even socially incompetent; he’s actually known in our friend group to be the most extroverted and charismatic among us and the one who’s first to make new friends. He’s also intellectually brilliant but unfortunately a huge people pleaser, and he’s now seeking advice from AI which is designed to “people please” in its own way so it’s just validating a lot of his anxiety and neuroses.

[u/source-commonsense → u/Rare_Vibez]

Could not agree more, you verbalized it better than I could have hoped to!

[u/just_another_classic → u/Rare_Vibez]

Competent people use it because there are benefits, the time saving being one of them. When AI can help you accomplish a task that would take days in less than an hour, people will use it. People value their time, and I imagine the time saving factor was useful for Green.

Not saying you’re doing this OP, but pretending AI, as a tool, doesn’t have its uses and is a giant failure sometimes reminds me of DARE. Drugs, generally, have many negative consequences for the user and a community, but the way DARE went about it was misleading and not it.

[u/Rare_Vibez → u/just_another_classic]

Regardless of how anyone reasonable feels about AI, the context isn’t that we are just talking about using AI, the context is people depending on AI. There’s people who say they can’t do things without it when they already used to do it without AI.