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Sophie Labelle | Instagram | Bluesky
Transcript
four frame comic.
first frame shows a typical AI poster that says : All chatgpt flyers look the same, especially with this font! the text above it reads : I won’t go to your event if the poster was made by AI.
second frame shows a still frame from a Hank Green youtube video. text above reads : I won’t read your post or email and I won’t watch your video if they were made with AI.
third frame shows an AI restaurant poster of burgers and chicken in a window. text reads : I won’t patronize your shop or restaurant if it is advertised with AI.
last frame shows an MS paint window with badly written : Your bad art is better than AI slop. text reads : if you can’t take the time or make the effort to interact with me yourself, then why should I do it?
The Hank Green bandwagon hate really fucking irritates me.
The man, and his brother, have done decades of charity work. Raised millions for all sorts of progressive causes (Pizzamas). Created completely free online educational course videos that I know a large percentage here used in highschool/college (Crash Course). Produced thousands of science videos and topics (SciShow). The pair of them spend their time trying to educate and improve lives in any way they can (VlogBrothers), and give back for everything they have.
Hank makes a video that appears to have AI assistance, and people are ready to drop them on the spot like none of that matters.
Hank even apologized for his reliance on it. Gave receipts that it was never used in any of his other works. Used his experience as a cautionary tale of how AI it take over a process, and promised to do better.
Doesn’t matter… his previous decades of charity. His lifelong commitment to education… irrelevant… people want to hang him out to dry.
The VlogBrothers stretch themselves over complex topics, educational materials, charity events… everything… FOR FREE. I don’t blame Hank for trying to streamline and organize things. I think the man has taken on way more than any one person should do. I think the people jumping on him to make him some kind of pariah are nothing but self-rightious douchebag fuckheads that haven’t done even a fraction of good as those two brothers have, and they know it. They want to use this one thing as though it somehow makes them superior, like they ever did a goddamn thing for anyone. Like they could even begin to understand that level of work and charity to do all of that.
The man made a mistake doing too much and these cretins are tearing him down for clout. It’s fucking disgusting. Decades of positivity without controversy and yet it has afforded him no grace from the people who readily consume his content.
I don’t really mind him using AI. As long as he takes responsibility for the output the tool isn’t something I really mind.
100% agree. People are shitting on Hank because they have literally nothing going on. They’ve made a hobby out of being outraged, and as a result have nothing more meaningful to contribute.
If they took the time to look into it, they’d realize the line they’re using to claim that AI writes his scripts was actually something he himself simply said. Not only did he not outsource his writing to AI, he’s honest enough that when people incorrectly accused him of this he disclosed that he does at times use it to aid his research. Not that anyone blathering about it values honesty enough to care.
Greens are treasures for humanity, and they did a lot of great. But previous achievements shouldn’t make you immune to criticism. And this is exact topic that should cause harsh criticisms. Hank is an educator, and the only good educator is one that has absolute trust of his audience. Right now his reaction to a backlash is exactly ideal one so I have good hope for the future, and I’m afraid it might not be so if the backlash wasn’t as harsh.
The whole reason Hank is so great is that his team does proper research, and they’re not afraid of showing their mistakes and correct them. If they start relying on LLMs, all of that can be thrown out of the window, you couldn’t trust anything anymore, LLM’s whole thing is that it breaks your brain into relying on it, as evident. A pop science video isn’t good at all, if the viewers will have to double check every point.
So this is exactly correct reaction that should be modeled for all such occasions in the future, from both parties actually. And in Green’s case, their previous legacy gives them enough social credits, that I totally trust him to be smart enough to reevaluate his processes and come up with safeguards, and if he actually does it, this will award him more trust.
Don’t conflate accountability with blind hate.
It’s easy to do nothing wrong, it’s hard to do something right. Hank Green is a treasure. His brother too.
He seems like good people to me. And Ai seems to be addicting like social media.
Yeah, the hate is unwarranted.
As always, there’s people who will basically take the it’s evil no matter what path. If they feel that heavily about AI, they probably shouldn’t be using anything that uses Linux. Which is basically just about everything on the web.
Hank was using it to create some games and do research for his videos. An AI is really good at creating code and for that purpose making a small game. AI can help you research things by finding and searching for things relevant to what you want, but then you need to rely on actually understanding what is being cited.
There are obvious downsides to AI and all the data centers and everything but going about and saying no matter why AI will never use is just a fool errand.
It’s worth push pushing back on data centers and what not And I am involved in several of those movements. But AI bad is just a stupid take, Especially when Hank is using it for all intents and purposes pretty responsibly compared to some people at larger companies.
I disagree with this statement but at the same time it’s probably good enough for whatever he used it for tho, i usually hate vibe coding but in this case i don’t care much, he overall did plenty of good and it’s not like all his content is AI made, (would’ve more appreciated if he paid someone to do it tho)
The whole problem is because it wasn’t good enough for whatever he used it for tho. It fried his brain and made his videos worse. That’s not good enough, that’s bad enough. Thankfully, Hank is smart and experienced, so he recognised the problem early enough. Hope it will be so.
that’s algorithm driven content platforms for you. youtube recommends to most people videos where people are raging, over the normal content of the channel. even people who don’t know him get to see it, or otherwise hear about the rage. then, since many are not watching the new videos youtube will recommend them to fewer people than before. meanwhile the rest of the internet only gets to know about the rage, and decades of good work and charity does not matter at all, because that’s the boring past nobody gets to know of. even the original viewer base gets reduced, because many see this fuckup but few remember what the creator is like actually. and the algorithm will surely not help to remember by showing the old videos.
It doesn’t matter what else you do or did, if you make something with AI, I don’t want it. I won’t say if he is a good or a bad man, but that was a bad video. Future videos may be good, if they are human constructed.
If you cared enough to actually find out what happened instead of mindlessly parroting the Twitter mob, you would know that not a single word Hank said was written by AI.
From my understanding only some research was done with Ai, no? Not any actual parts of the video
If that’s the case, then as long as the “AI research” was thoroughly checked by a human, then I can’t imagine how he’d have even been caught using AI. So, it’s strange that he was caught.
If it wasn’t thoroughly checked by a human, then that’s a pretty big mistake… but if it was actually only done for one video, I would view this as something that could be a learning experience more than something that deserves cancellation. Still a huge mistake, though.
It wasn’t actually “bad” research that triggered it. It was the absolute INSANE fact that a single goddamn sentence of Hanks sounded like AI. Of course, Hanks videos trained all these models, so that’s not actually surprising to anyone with a brain. Which most fervent AI haters lack.
He made the mistake of treating his audience like grown adults, and explained the situation honestly. He uses AI for some research, but the text in question was written by humans. Now the witch hunt was off to the races. Anything not entirely perfect he had done (like the crocheting thing) was ripe picking to pretend that no single human had ever made a mistake. Surely, it must be the evil AI. Surely, Hank must be lieing.
Ironically, Hank should’ve lied. He treated an online hate mob like grown adults, which is always a mistake. They never actually reward honesty or accountability or positive change. All they want is outrage and hate.
“so that’s not actually surprising to anyone with a brain. Which most fervent AI haters lack.”
Oh the irony.
It was a very niche topic about crocheting or something, I think? The problem is that he didn’t know about it, so he was researching it as part of the script. And because he didn’t know about it, he didn’t realize that some of the information was wrong. Well, the crochet community knew it was wrong, because of course they’d know more about the topic. So that got people questioning how Hank could have come to this wrong information which led to people further dissecting the video and concluding that it was AI assisted.
So, Hank, a human, looks to learn about a topic he wants to talk about it. He, a human, does check the material, but he’s not really qualified to know if the material is right (hence wanting to learn about it).
I think what he should do (and I think he kind of touched on this, but I don’t know where) is he should reach out to experts in that field to verify his scripts. Rather than just trying to verify them himself. Especially if its about a topic he’s not super confident in.
But most importantly… none of that makes the man out to be some kind mega villain, AI-slop loving, earth killing hypocrite that people are making him out to be. Just a dude who wanted to talk about something and made a mistake. And yet people want to run him through some kind of humiliation ritual and penance. It’s sad.
What you’re describing doesn’t count as checking the material to me. If I was tasked with double-checking AI research on a topic where I had zero knowledge, I would use a search engine to find some reliable-looking source that said the same thing as the AI.
If you find a second source, then you should be able to point at that page to day where you got it from.
If the fact is so esoteric that you can’t find any reliable second sources, then you have to start questioning where did the AI get the information in the first place, and suspect that the facts were hallucinations.
To me, that’s what you have to do to check AI. I do this process even if I am just googling something for myself and am presented with an AI summary that seems on-point.
Yea well, anyone can come in after the fact and be like “Well if it was me, I would have earned my honorary doctorates researching the topic beforehand to verify it”…
Not very helpful. And it’s easy for you to say that because you’re not a position to prove it. So… yay you, you sure would do that, good for you.
I’m not gonna play “move the goal posts” with you all day.
I just did a search on it and apparently someone said that a particular sentence in the video sounded like it was written by AI. He said that it wasn’t written by AI and in fact wasn’t written at all as it was ad-libbed during filming. He then confessed that he has been relying too much on Chat GPT for research and that his script did sound too much like AI.
Kotaku article
There is not much to interpret: in the video, he reads directly a prompt response.
People (aka Russian and Republican propagandists) have been wanting to tear him down for years and now they’ve taken their chance. They did it to Sam Neill too (and it probably killed him).
Edit. I regularly attend international security conferences for my job. No, this is not a conspiracy theory. Russian interference will be the “wir haben es nicht gewusst” of this era.
If people go to you for answers, the trust will be heavily damaged if you are constantly using ai. So yeah it’s really fucking stupid of him.
There are those who still use quills. Quakers that use horse and buggy. But the vast majority of our decedents will use AI for the majority of tasks from this day forward.
What a terrible argument of false equivalence.
Why do AI advocates always assume the generative auto-complete machine is the future? The tech was made through theft of IP and forced on a public that doesn’t want it.
It is nice that there is a vocal minority so against any form of AI.
But that isn’t what the general trend is. More and more people, especially young ones, are using Gen AI for all sorts of tasks. And with the constant improvements, this number is only set to grow.
You may not like it, but that is how it is.
The vast majority hate ai.
Isn’t he just predicting the future, not advocating for it?
the vast majority of our descendants will use rocks after AI-driven missile detection system thinks a bird is an incoming nuke during a period of extreme geopolitical tensions on the grounds that most people have to choose between buying food or paying water and electricity bills
Greetings, Professor Falkengood movie.
I could’ve also described how our descendants will be dragging their soft gelatin bodies across harsh rocky terrain in a torrent of neverending suffering, but I dont think ai is gonna get that smart
Radium is inevitable.
Yeah, go educate yourself a basic amount please.