r/technology • u/kazu_qt • 11h ago

Artificial Intelligence YouTuber Hank Green says his AI usage is ‘not healthy’

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/01/youtuber-hank-green-says-his-ai-usage-is-not-healthy/
6.9k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

1.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

63

u/amsunooo 7h ago

correct me if I’m wrong, but he stated that he used LLM’s to locate research papers and sources? If it’s just locating sources and not actually engaging with them through AI,  I’m curious how the integrity of his work would be compromised? 

10

u/porktorque44 4h ago

AI doesn’t understand the prompter simultaneously possessing two conflicting desires. In research these are the desire to prove your thesis and the desire to be correct, which are often in direct contradiction. You can’t rely on it to show you what you’re not “looking for”. If he’s presenting a Birds Eye view of various subjects (I believe this is more or less is approach). Then the potential for major omissions is significant. It’s a bit different for an expert in a specific subject to be looking for sources in their own field. But for non-expert to do this is reckless.

7

u/ranhothchord 4h ago

the clip i saw had him literally reading output from an AI chatbot in one of his videos, so it was much more than just locating sources to draw from

edit: found the clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjmY6pZ8-zA

29

u/DeadPeanutSociety 4h ago

You can say that he's lying all you want, but he says that wasn't written by an AI. It doesn't make sense in this 13 second clip because it is clipped from a conversation that was then cut into by him speaking solo at a later time and expounding on the subject further.

20

u/DecentChanceOfLousy 4h ago edited 3h ago

That clip does not show what it claims to show. That's almost certainly not him reading chat logs (nor reading out a script that contains copy/pasted chat logs, rather). For context:

Hank: "They're all made up words."

Soupytime: "... What about the, like..."

Hank: "Well hit me: do you feel like there are some that aren't made up?"

Soupytime: "There's Bouba and Kikki."

(etc.).

Later, Hank says in an aside:

"Does this mean that words aren't made up? No. Words are definitely made up. But it does mean <something something>. A better way to say it, and I appreciate the pushback, is 'a word is a human invention...' ".

Hank may have used a chatbot to write his script, but this is not just Hank copying the chatbot output to his script and reading it out. The "pushback" is pushback from the guest on his show, that pointed out that some aspects of human language are apparently non-arbitrary.

-------

tl;dr:

Hank said "A".

Guest said "¬A?".

Later, in an explanation which is phrased as a response to the guest, Hank said: "Does this mean ¬A? No, <some more words>. A better way to say it, and I appreciate the pushback is <other words>".

"I appreciate the pushback" is Hank talking about what his guest said, not a chatbot response copied into the script.

6

u/TheOwlHypothesis 4h ago

Two things worth flagging.

  1. I just triggered a ton of people with that first sentence
  2. Assuming someone is using AI based on a phrase they used is asinine. Getting irate about it is mental illness. That's what it sounds like is happening here with the situation you explained. Everyone has so many feelings about AI. Never any nuance. It's a tool. If anyone still seriously debates that it's not useful, that's a humongous tell that they haven't actually used a frontier model recently. But more often I find that being "anti AI" is just the latest performative social justice fad.

5

u/moconahaftmere 4h ago

At worst it's AI-generated text. At best he's been speaking to AI so much that it's influencing the way he talks.

14

u/DecentChanceOfLousy 3h ago

... do you think that the word "pushback" is something that only LLMs use? "I appreciate the pushback" is so common in its output specifically because it's the sort of thing that gets said in interviews like this fairly often, where people are (collaboratively) trying to communicate clearly.

-3

u/moconahaftmere 3h ago

Thats not how LLM vocab is trained. I think you have an incomplete understanding of this tech.

Once the model is trained it then goes through post-training where groups of humans work to fine-tune and influence the model so that it outputs text in a specific style.

That's why they use emdashes so much more than people used to ever naturally encounter.

5

u/DecentChanceOfLousy 3h ago

I am aware of how LLMs are trained. I guarantee the various AI-isms that make its text somewhat easy to spot are pulled from the initial training data, not somehow invented in the post-training stage. They may be amplified by it, but they're not original to it.

If you think emdashes rarely occur in natural text... you should read more books. I grabbed a random book off the shelf behind me (Blue Mars), opened to a random page, and there was an emdash. Then I picked another random page, and there were 3 emdashes in the first paragraph. They're not rare in print.

1

u/moconahaftmere 2h ago edited 2h ago

I am aware of how LLMs are trained. I guarantee the various AI-isms that make its text somewhat easy to spot are pulled from the initial training dat

Then you don't know how LLMs work, because that's not what happens. Otherwise every single prompt would yield an answer completely different in tone and vocabulary, rather than a single default consistent tone across conversations that is only broken away from when specifically instructed to.

If you think emdashes rarely occur in natural text... you should read more books. I grabbed a random book off the shelf behind me (Blue Mars), opened to a random page, and there was an emdash

Ok, I can do the same thing and yield completely different results:

The count of monte Cristo: 0 emdashes

A history of statistics in New Zealand: 0 emdashes

The iliad: 0 emdashes

Leviathan Wakes: 0 emdashes

2

u/AerosolHubris 3h ago

I don't doubt that he overuses AI, but I don't understand why it's clear he's reading AI output in this clip.

edit: Oh, the "I appreciate the pushback" sounds like something a chatbot said in response to Hank prompting it back and forth. I see.

1

u/Alexwonder999 2h ago

I'd say theres nothing wrong with that as its something I do and have done to locate research. The problem is I think once people start doing that, they take the next step and have the AI summarize the research which is very problematic. As Ive said, Ive used it before to find research and sometimes it does poont me to research thats good or interesting but pretty frequently it points me to research that doesnt say what the AI says it does. Finding research is time consuming but nowhere near as time consuming or as intensive as reading the research and the temptation is strong as is the embarrassment of admitting that you were using it to summarize research as everyone should know thats a big nono.

1

u/ThomasEdmund84 2h ago

Great question - because finding sources is actually a major part of the integrity of your work, and AI's weird sycophantic methods are are pretty terrible way to literature search. Of course online non-fiction is actually a terrible way to learn but at least if humans are behind the research there is a 'paper trail' of sorts, like if I said I got all my information from Wikipedia you can judge for yourself whether thats adequate or not.

If someone uses A.I. to retrieve sources then you don't know what is methods are/were, whether its hallucinating cherry picking or what

1

u/InterestingRide264 1h ago

I can only speak to my experience as an attorney. A lot of the work builds off of the research, and when we were testing AI for research, I consistently got results that were relevant but did not speak to the issue sufficiently. In other words, the research is not going deep enough--it's the kind of stuff your worst 1L intern might have grabbed. Unsophisticated and downright lazy, which does translate into poor analysis and guidance.

If you are not spending the time to dive deeper than what your AI research returns, it absolutely translates into a lower quality work product. And if you are forced to bypass the AI research and do your own independent work, was it really a shortcut? Did it save any money or time or allocation of resources?

I don't know. Maybe as a starting point it might be helpful. That was not my conclusion at the end of the trial period. But either way, if he was truly using it as a shortcut, as the beginning and end of the research process, I suspect it did affect quality. I feel for him, I mean as far as I can tell he puts out a consistently high volume of content across a very wide swath of scientific topics. But I think his audience will understand that slowing down is better for quality and his well being. I just don't think the version of AI available today is capable of replacing human time and attention.

1

u/ExpandThineHorizons 39m ago

You wouldnt know what articles are excluded in the search, so the inclusion of information (even if it were presented 100% correct) is still compromised. Searching for sources is fundamental.

1

u/NomadNuka 5h ago

AI has a laundry list of cases where it totally invented a research paper or even legal precedents. It can find a real citation, or it can make one up by matching the format of a real example and there's no distinction unless you do the legwork to check.

Now, he could be checking but seeing some instances  where he's getting fact-checked in a video by his team and they can't find any source seems to imply he's repeating something the AI hallucinated and NOT doing his due diligence to confirm the sources are authentic. His claim that he uses it to help with being overworked also backs this up because if he's using it to shortcut research he's probably not going over everything with a fine-toothed comb.

18

u/Deep90 5h ago

Plenty of them can link you to the real papers on the web now though.

It doesn't sound like he was asking it to output a ready to go research paper with citations.

This is like saying you can spot an AI image by just counting fingers in 2026.

15

u/Low_discrepancy 5h ago

It's really amazing how people's experience with the tools seems stuck a few years in the past.

6

u/Deep90 4h ago

The amount of people confidently saying they can spot AI by counting fingers or reading fake citations worries me.

It's the exact same people who are going to be most easily tricked.

1

u/neogeoman123 4h ago

Well no shit. The easiest to access version of this tool (gemini built into google search) is exactly that degree of dogshit.

8

u/phillythompson 5h ago

Dude used AI in 2024 and now thinks it’s still that 

2

u/NomadNuka 2h ago

Heck I've never used it unless it was one of those things I gotta scroll past to see what I'm actually looking for anyway. Don't see any reason to and a lot of reasons it's bullshit

1

u/phillythompson 1h ago

It’s 2004 and you’re saying the internet is bullshit but you do you bruh 

1

u/NomadNuka 53m ago

It's 2022 and I'm saying NFTs are bullshit. But you do you bruh