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.
Cognitive surrender for productivity?
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?
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!
when he messed up was when he pissed off the crochet and knitter crowd. 😂
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
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.
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.”
Glad he’s recognizing the problem and trying to get help. Instant gratification is a hell of a drug.
ah yes, hank green who spent an entire video chastising the citizens of ireland for being ignorant of the amoc.
dude never even bothered to think people called it something else there.
hes always been a self-satisfied, arrogant knob
Had to Google AMOC?
Oh right, it’s the famous Gulf Stream we rely on and are all worried about of late. Am in Ireland…
exactly. he spent 30 minutes calling the irish ignorant, but the words “gulf stream” never tickled his neurons.
the extra-irony is that up until the last 10-15 years, “gulf stream” is what everyone in the usa called it, too. hank’s just so tech-pilled he can’t see anything else.
I only started paying attention to him recently, but I could swear he had a little meltdown in a video hating AI and had to calm himself with his word association game. Maybe I’m thinking of his brother.
I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs…with doing more and more and more and more…is not healthy for me or good for the world. It is careless, and has disconnected me from where people are on this.
I think this is very honest and we shouldn’t give someone shit for speaking up.
Hank Green has earned the right, with me anyway, to have his point of view heard. And frankly he has more credibility with me than the garden variety pitchfork-wielding anti-AI mob. I think Hank is a person who finds AI interesting and sees upsides as well as downsides. But the aforementioned mob is not interested in anything other than the emotional catharsis of railing against something they hate.
Now ask me if the mob is in the room with us, because it probably is.
You sound like you lick Grok and Gippitys silicon balls.
His AI use caused him so many problems in his private life that his family had to intervene. His point of view is “This technology has had a negative impact on my life and the lives of the people I care about”.
Your pro-AI spiel is a bit tone deaf here
But they didn’t say anything pro-AI. At most they were anti-anti-AI mob, which is just reasonable, as is with any “mob”. And I read mob here as mindless parrots that keep repeating talking points and hating for the sake of conformity.
Being anti-anti something is being pro-something. That’s the beauty of the double negative.
Also that’s just a very pro-AI user, so the intent can be inferred
You’re conflating two different somethings. Anti-AI mob is not the same as AI. Being against mob mentality doesn’t make you inherently pro AI.
It’s possible to be pro or anti mob mentality and AI in various different combinations.
You’re on Lemmy… any statements about AI, Musk, trump, McConnell, etc that aren’t over-the-top against them will be met with downvotes.
Okay but why would anyone be anything but over-the-top against anything on your list?
I mean, like, everything you listed is dog shit.
That’s what I keep fucking asking, Like how can anyone with half a brain be okay with any of them?
There wasn’t an intervention, he asked them about his AI use in response to the outrage and they agreed he’d been using it unhealthy.
Seemed to me more along the lines of “do I have too much salt?” , “yeah you should cut back” ; Then “your coke problem is tearing this family apart”
Agreed, this is new technology for everybody, we’re allowed growing pains.
Its pretty fucking simple to not use it.
I understand where you’re coming from, but you could almost always say this about every kind of mistake every person has ever made, and then sit there wondering why humans ever make mistakes, you know?
This. AI and more generally algorithm dependence is an addiction and watching him struggle with it the past few years has been heartbreaking. Watching him try to bargain and rationalize an objectively misanthropic technology that grew out of a sphere that he was a major role in and did begin as an objectively beautiful attempt at building community and healthy dialogue is very disappointing. I don’t hate or judge him. He tried to do something beautiful. He just didn’t understand the Faustian bargain he made in the process. The systemic forces turning his work into poison.
I don’t judge him for wrestling with it. I’m sad for him. I’m sad for a lot of us. We’re all working in a system that’s slowly killing us to some degree or another. There is no ethically clean life in a system predicated on greed, gluttony and lies. His optimism may have slipped into delusional, but it beats the crushing cynicism that comes with naked realism.
I don’t think that we should lose hope, but the future can’t look like this. His Icarus moment shouldn’t be the end of his journey. I hope he finds himself and begins planting new seeds even if none of us ever live to see the shade of the trees that grow from them.
Well said
Here’s Hank’s response on Reddit.
Thanks for linking that. I wonder how long he’s been using it for. I feel like I noticed at uptick lately in just how saccharine his writing and worldview was getting
Yeah, that new cosmic shore video was really good. I’m kind of disappointed that might be just AI writing.
There are few people I trust more than Hank Green when it comes to something like AI.
Respectfully, I don’t really understand this opinion. Reading between the lines, he read a Chat-GPT prompt on video, denied it despite it being on video, seemingly leading to his wife and brother holding an intervention on his behalf which ultimately lead to this ‘confession.’
Swap AI for any other behavior or substance, and we’d be calling him an addict in need of treatment. An addict’s opinion on the validity of their addiction is useless. Hank Green of all people not being able to have a healthy relationship with chatbots is alarming and this is more proof to me that we need even more grains of salt when AI users assure us that AI is great.
That’s exactly how I saw it. He’s showing signs of addiction and needs to get help for such. He’s quit and gone back to twitter many times and stories he tells from his youth also hit close enough to home for me to have that worry.
His recent history puts him at the bottom of the list of people I would trust regarding AI.
Let me save everyone a click.
This December 2025 video, 20+ minutes long, barely contains any information about Hank Green on AI. The Hank Green content there is consists of one or two lines he spoke in Sci Show videos buried deep in a diatribe about how AI is overblown.
I don’t think the video is worth watching at all, but it is certainly not a relevant contribution to this thread.
His quote from the article:
“[…] I need to come to terms with the fact that the level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs…with doing more and more and more and more…is not healthy for me or good for the world. It is careless, and has disconnected me from where people are on this.
I was talking about this with [my wife] Katherine last night and she did not pull any punches. Frankly, neither did [my brother] John. Neither of them think I’ve been being healthy. I need to readjust.”
Not really knowing the drama before today, it seems like he is being very rational and speaking honestly about the effects LLMs are having on his behavior and that he identified he needs to change, which is what the whole article is about.
The article (Hank Green understanding himself) and the comment I was responding to (Hank Green misleading people about AI) are two similar different topics that can and should be judged separately.
I was responding to the person who said he was generally trustworthy about the topic in general, with what I think is a significant counterexample.
I guess it’s up to the reader to determine if the linked article from a few days ago of Hank reflecting bullish attitude should be judged separately from the articles and videos months ago about his behavior he has since identified as problematic. Maybe he used to be a piece of shit, not anymore? People can change.
I don’t associate these two different events as evidence of a shift in personal stances, because they can both be things he believes at the same time. That also means that hopefully people can empathize with him even while disagreeing with his stances about some things.
(If his stance did change, that would be great and I wouldn’t want to deny it, but his video promoting AI lobbyists is still unfortunately up.)
Slicked back hair, sloppy steaks at Truffoni’s.
People can change
I don’t generally click on random YouTube videos unless more information is provided, but I give this one a gamble. It was pretty well done and I appreciate the creators overall point and evidence. For anyone else in the comments, I think there are two couple of second long clips of Hank Green that are used to make a larger point about what are essentially attempts at normalizing AI.
Right after posting this, I stumbled on basically a text version of the same sentiment. I can understand not wanting to trust a random YouTube video, even if it is about a guy who most people know due to his own YouTube videos.
The post being: https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/hank-green-and-the-fantastical-tales-of-god-ais/
Wow, this guy can write. When I got to “The Ghost Stories of Savannah”, I thought for moment that it was an unnecessary detour - then I saw it.
Ok, I watched up until he started comparing the development of “AI”, as he calls it, to the development of nuclear fission technology, and that’s where I got fed up. Is generative AI as “impactful” as a nuclear weapon detonation over a city? This guy says no, but I don’t know how you can possibly compare the two. LLMs are great at manipulating information, they aren’t high-energy explosives. There’s no common definition of “impactful” that meaningfully puts the two technologies on the same scale of comparison. They’re just different.
And why does it matter, anyway? Is “nuclear weapons” the bar for when we should start caring about impactful technologies? I think not. Generative AI is an informational monster born of the internet and it is unique to it, and that is a huge problem given that the internet is quickly becoming the defacto medium of communication for groups over a certain size. We should be taking it seriously, full stop. I’m less interested in ranking it alongside other catastrophic technologies.
I think we haven’t seen the full potential of generative AI yet, and I fear it may be quite destructive (more destructive) if we can’t engineer our way around the dead internet that it was created to usher in. I think we should be trying to learn about it, how it works, how it may evolve, and how to have a usable internet alongside it.
All hail Hank of Green, King of slop
I stroke a had
