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.
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?
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.
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.
Also an old.
The outrage machine has never been anything but a slow drip of poison to keep us too overwhelmed/afraid to see what the oligarch class is doing to us.
Now it’s a fire hose.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those who are the most vulnerable to fall for the cult are a) those who have no safeguards or experience and thus don’t see the signs that it is a cult, and b) those who see the signs and know for a fact it is a cult, but think themselves they can outsmart the cult.
His overconfidence is the reason he is leaning so hard into AI. Because he thinks himself knowledgeable and smart enough to always know better than the AI slop. He is the perfect mark to fall for it.
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.
rational*
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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.
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 can understand why this technology would be particularly addicting to hank.
His whole persona is answering questions like “what color flower do bees like the most” with the kind of enthusiasm that shows his curiosity and deep passion for science. So a machine where you can put in those sorts of questions and get an almost instant answer would be very addicting.
But when I get fixated on something, I want the correct answer. I’d hate to learn the wrong answer and repeat it to someone - I’ve done that before and I hate it. That’s why I avoid AI on principle. I want the right answer and AI won’t give that to me about things I know about so I won’t trust it on things I don’t know about.
This is the thing about LLMs and their users I genuinely don’t get. Like, objectively, being able to input plain speech into a computer and get an almost immediate, detailed, 95% accurate answer is incredible. Genuine technological marvel.
But 95% accuracy is functionally useless for all but the most basic, unimportant tasks. Outside of a coding context (a big exception, to be clear), are people really satisfied with that?
Let’s be honest, most sources online are not 100% accurate. Even before LLMs, find any random article about something you’re an expert in, and there was a good chance you’d spot some inaccuracies. Most of the time, those inaccuracies aren’t a big deal, and when they are, you should be consulting an expert for those.
For me personally, I would rate AI accuracy at about 75%. And for some of my use cases, that’s a pretty decent starting point. Things with no consequences, like trying to quickly find the relevant console command for the game I’m playing. I can get instant feedback on whether it gave me correct info, and if not then I hit Google.
I would never trust AI, at least in its current state, to tell me the truth for anything of consequence.
Let’s be honest, most sources online are not 100% accurate.
Most scientific reviews cite papers in which only the title was read, and often the titles are not justified in the papers.
The majority of human history at all levels of science, philosophy, and mathematics. The best you could ever hope for was 95%. Hell you were lucky to break 90% accuracy.
Because the only people you could ask questions was the people in the room with you right then and there or the people you could actively physically go ask.
If you were extremely lucky you could write to someone who MIGHT know more. Or may there’s a book about it that someone knows exists.
95% can and frequently is very much over kill for almost everything anyone will need for their day to day life for random trivia or even most important work.
Very few fields need more than that, and few still is it a matter of life or death.
The part that people fuck up is not being open to learning more and being corrected.
If you can confirm it, it doesn’t matter what percentage is correct.
When solving computer problems, using an LLM to guide you to the correct answer doesn’t even need 95% accuracy. Every step it gives you have to execute manually, so if something is hallucinated you will notice really quickly. And if by the end your problem is solved, then all the hallucinations didn’t matter.
You could do just as well googling Stack Overflow back when Google wasn’t shit.
But now both SO and Google are shit…
You’re immune to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect!
You should avoid social media. You aren’t immune to wrong answers here either. You can just read it from another person and carry it with you. Best get offline!
Perfect example, wrong answer. Stay on the Fediverse, at least until Eternal September gets here.
For what he’s trying to do, it’s not even a horrible use-case. But as someone is a ready to go to the mat on fact checking, he’s definitely not anywhere near arduous enough about it.
He’s not treating it like aunt marge. You wouldn’t make a tv show around finding out truth, then go ask your aunt Marge and not follow up on her answers.
AI for general information gives you approximate directions at best, maybe you got a wikipedia page and maybe you’re reading 297 regurgitations of some asshole that didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about on reddit who got reposted over and over.
The best way I’ve seen it put is that ai is the perfected form of the wisdom of the masses. It’s 90% right 90% of the time. But the most important part is the last 10%.
90% is good enough for most things in your day to day life that have no consequences. But it’s like people have forgotten what it was like before smart phones.
Back when your best chance of a good answer was asking who ever was in hear shot if they knew and just accepting that as good enough. You never treated it as fact just as the best answer your going to get at the moment.
For anything important you would go to the damn library.
It’s 90% right 90% of the time. But the most important part is the last 10%.
No LLM model system card claims such high rate as 90%. Fable claims in its system card, what, 40% hallucination rate?
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10791 yep (no Fable score here)
Only they’re not “answers”. AI does not provide information, it tells you what you want to hear. It even makes up fake scientific papers as “references”. So you think your info is backed up by peer reviewed sources. Nope!
Oh they’ll give “answers” alright. They could just be wrong or untethered from reality.
One of my favorite economics bloggers for decades started sourcing his information with LLMs. He was such a bright guy. 😭
The better models absolutely will cite real scientific papers that are relevant to your discussion. It doesn’t hallucinate as a matter of course, it can hallucinate some of the time. You can’t trust what it gives you 100%, you have to verify it. But it very often gives useful answers and information.
It even makes up fake scientific papers as “references”
Broski, it’s not early 2023 anymore. Thinking models with internet access have been able to provide public sources just for over a year now. Technology evolves; shocking, I know…
They do far better today than they did three years ago, but they still get stuff wrong constantly. I’ve had it give me the source for claims, and the source says the exact opposite of what it claimed. This isn’t a quantized to hell model running on my own hardware, but Opus from Claude.
My go to is to get people to ask it something they know a lot about, and see how bad inaccurate it is. If it gets something you know about so wrong, how wrong is it for everything else?
ok, but they will give you a different answer to a question a day later if you delete previous prompts.
That’s just not true.
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 👺
I was watching something last night about how high intelligence doesn’t mean superpowers, it simply means increased processing power. It means the ability to see more problems ahead, to ruminate, to worry about how to address them. It makes sense that a lot of people with high intelligence and compassion are anxious. Being able to foresee and worry about so many things stresses people out. Add in the limitations of being a human being with a finite capacity for doing things to address said problems, and well.
All of these very intelligent people being caught up in using AI because of the thought that it will increase their ability to get things done, be more productive, do ‘more and more,’ like Hank said, makes absolute sense.
It is unfortunately perfectly suited to people who feel they need to solve everything to find any kind of internal peace. The temptation to think that you are The One Who Can Use It Right To Help Save The World when everyone else is prone to succumbing to AI psychosis or simply being fed falsehoods and accepting them as presented… well, it results in things like this, doesn’t it?
his brother wrote a book on climate change, they should talk to each other
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.”
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.
some of the recent episodes were quite sloppy. they just stuck to the original format.
What are you using it for during the 1%??
Personally I’ve found that ai is fantastic at pulling files off my phone cause I’m a lazy shit… Iv trained it so that when I tell it “do the thing” it pulls all the pictures off my phone and backs them up.
It’s fun, whimsical, and while I could do it a host of other ways. This is just more fun.
Which is honestly kinda what I see as one of the better use cases for local models. Sure you could do the same thing with a script, or by hand.
But it’s not as /fun/ as having a little robot butler that slings one liners from various cartoons that you don’t have to prepick as it enacts your will.
…so your good use case for AI is running a task apps have been able to do automatically for 20 years…?
It’s like buying a robot butler to manually turn off the lights
Yes we did that with smart bulbs. We aren’t against the robot butler.
That’s what I’m saying. The butler is overkill for a solved problem
Just have the ai make the script. It’s going to go off the rails one day and you’ll regret that whimsy.
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])
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.
Glad he’s recognizing the problem and trying to get help. Instant gratification is a hell of a drug.
christ this comment section is unhinged
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
