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.
I’m sorry that things got bad enough to require inpatient care, but I’m glad you were able to get some help — I hope it did actually help. I know from firsthand experience that one never fully recovers from PTSD, in the sense that you can’t go back to how things were before. However, I also know that it’s possible to continue living life with the psychological equivalent of a massive scar, even if it is still red and angry and often painful — but not really possible to when instead of a scar, you have an open, gaping wound.
I hope you were able to make some progress towards healing, even if it’ll take much longer to fully heal.
I also appreciate your attempt to leverage your own experience to promote compassion for Green. I’ve not read the rest of the comments here yet, but I can imagine there are a lot of people with uncharitable stances towards the situation. I am pretty steadfastly anti-AI, but I think it’s important that we consider the person at the centre of any problematic AI use
Why the fuck would you use AI to write this.
I’m not AI, just struggling to articulate myself in matters like this. Though I can see why you thought it was AI — reading it back, I can see that there are a few phrases that are common AI-isms. I’m pretty opposed to AI use at the best of times, but I agree with you that it would be fucked up to use it for this.
No Tricafta or any of the newer ones work for you?
The last stage trials came out when I was in the ICU waiting for my lungs, it wasn’t an option I was too sick. That said I’m glad I got new lungs since I’m significantly healthier now than the people I know going the gene editing route, obviously survivorship bias is at play since I got great lungs but I’m very healthy these days, even if I did end up living in the ICU for 6 months, 3 pre transplant and 3 post, we joke I paid for them upfront since I hadn’t had any serious issues after I was discharged, other than the mental toll of course.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
But this is the first time there’s been this significant of an impact on one’s mental health(?) I’m unsure. It’s so easy to get caught up in that dopamine hit where you feel like you did something. Its even more frustrating when you’re forced to use it in work regularly, whether directly or indirectly (if you’re coworkers are using it there is an indirect force to use it if you need to stay competitive and keep your job and feed yourself and your loved ones especially if your workspace is not healthy)
Thought experiment: is it better to treat the AI as a contractor (fivver etc) who is doing the task you’re asking rather than thinking of it as something you’re doing? From a mental health perspective A contractor because you are only to talk a out the task and nothing else really. That way it’s work could be more distant and you’re less likely to associate it to your work and boost in productivity?
No. This is a line we cannot cross and if it destroys us, so be it. I’m not against AI, or automation. But not these tools. Not these companies. Not these models. The question is death or death. So we learn to live without, or we die. There is no synthesis possible with this paradigm.
The cats out of the bag, so what are we gonna do now. Like replace that but not this with any other tech you should stop using, say social media, good luck. So what are we going to do now?
What do we do? We’re doing it. We’re asking questions, we’re building communities IRL and in digital paces outside the bounds of the major corps. We use poison pills to make corpos that embrace these systems pay dearly. We give grace to those who sincerely pull back and we move on.
Cocaine exists and it can be a major boost to productivity. But we don’t have to use it. We don’t have to live with its downsides slowly killing us and robbing us of our humanity.
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Yes. He doesn’t want to admit, he’s gone as far down this path as he responsibly can. He doesn’t want to transition to the “producer” role, where he becomes a resource for a new generation that’s seeking a future away from the old platforms.
It’s a bit like the oil man who knows his work enabled so much good, unable to also admit his product has a dark side, and it’s time for us all to move on from it. That times changed and a new world is struggling to be born.
I disagree about “edutainment” in a qualified way. We still need communicators and domain experts sharing their knowledge, and there’s still a great deal of knowledge to share, but I don’t think it’s on YouTube (or TikTok). People talking out of turn on matters so far outside their expertise and experience they’re effectively neophytes, and just as vulnerable to Dunning-Kruger impulses certainly doesn’t help. I don’t think that AI or better algorithms are going to save them either, that’s a good way to end up lost in a psychotic hallucination. I don’t know what it will look like yet but it isn’t going to come from the tech giants. Unless Wikipedia wants to take a crack at it, they might be the only ones that could pull it off.
I mean, we are all going to die. In fact it’s the fear of that that built these AI systems. If you want to go against them then accept death and extinction as our future.
No. I refuse. We may die, but I refuse to surrender. Where there is life, there is hope, and we’re not dead yet.
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.
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
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”
He said they “did not pull any punches” which implies it was a more blunt conversation than you’re suggesting.
Hank Green himself describes his relationship with AI the same way you would an addiction, and specifically mentions the dopamine reaction driving his use of it to a point where he became overwhelmed by it.
He’s not describing a casual discussion about table salt, he’s literally describing a drug/alcohol addiction.
I said nothing pro-AI. But by accusing me of that, you reveal where your own bias (and defensiveness) lies. So thanks for that.
You’re also exaggerating the facts. They didn’t stage an intervention. He turned to his wife and brother and said “do you think my AI use is unhealthy?”
You’ve said plenty pro-AI lol. You don’t have to get so defensive about it, just own your position.
I’ve exaggerated nothing. Hank himself said he’s spoken to both his wife and brother about his AI use and said they “didn’t pull any punches”, which implies there was a blunt conversation about it, if not two.
You don’t actually fucking know him.
That’s probably why he wrote an in depth explanation of what he did, his motive, how it affected him etc.
His public posts on the matter were not made for the people who actually know him.
That’s fair. It’s a new technology, we need trusted people to explore it and tell us what their experience was. I don’t think we have very many trusted people left
You sound like you lick Grok and Gippitys silicon balls.
I don’t even know what that second one is, and I wouldn’t touch Xitter with a ten foot turd.
Ok, I guess you were too busy fondling Gr0ks and gipeettys balls to type out a constructive response. Are these how you’d like them to participate in your silicon fetish?
I literally use no AI in my day to day. I try and bully AI users tbh
Good job, now shut the fuck up, adults are talking.
Yeah, part of what I appreciate about him is that he does consistently acknowledge when he fucks up and tries to change.
For me it’s just another disconnected millionaire Youtuber. But he‘s kind of blaming AI or rather his relationship with LLMs for this dilemma instead of actually reflecting on himself. If he thinks simply abstaining from using LLMs will establish a connection to the people he‘s dead wrong and will likely fall back on AI in no time.
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.
I’m going to wait and see how he handles this hurdle before I form any long term opinions. Could be an honest mistake that he learns from and improves for the future.
I mean this is true of all sources and they should be checked.
Facts
He didn’t state what his actual process was. People assume that just means firing out a query and no bothering to check it, he said he uses it to summarize sources to see if they are worth reading. I don’t think that’s unreasonable if he still reads them.
Regarding using it to write scripts, I think if you use LLMs to generate something you are good at making and are picky and opinionated about, the review process very quickly makes you skeptical about the output.
Before the response, IP rights and environmental effects of LLMs are completely valid and are a valid reason for opposing them. Don’t just assume someone’s using it out of laziness instead of in an attempt to scale up their own work.
Papers have an abstract and summary sections SPECIFICALLY for this reason and usually aren’t more than a paragraph; there’s no excuse to use LLM.
I read a decent number of papers. If you’re looking for something specific, and abstract isn’t enough. If you want to research something specific that’s not the core focus of the paper, you at least need to skim it.
If Hank Greene is understaffed, using AI to prefilter papers isn’t a terrible use of the technology.
Addictive behavior often includes being incapable of accurately describing or confronting their usage habits.
I think that’s unreasonable, but that’s just me.
Ok
You know llm sources are just as verifiable as anything else right? All information is imperfect and has to be verified, period.
I don’t know about going that far - LLMs can be a great starting point …. As long as you click through to the sources rather than blindly accept
Creating science Youtube videos is not more important than maintaining a livable planet. AI is unnecessary and harmful, and should not be used outside of certain brute-force type of applications like protein folding, simulating new drug structures, or preliminary cancer diagnosis.
Golf courses use 30x the water that data centers use. Lawns, 100x. Standby mode for appliances costs more energy, by a lot. I wonder how much carbon emissions are offset by people no longer driving to work at call centers and the like.
Out of curiosity do you eat meat? .2% of water is used on data centers. 9.8% is used on beef. For carbon emissions one pound of beef consumed is equivalent to about 640,000 prompts.
AI is an environmental concern but the way people act about it is straight up ridiculous.
Edit: I am very proud of all of the vegans who unplug their appliances who are downvoting me. I, too, am a vegan who unplugs their appliances.
I don’t have a golf course or a membership so
thanks for that irrelevant factoid
and yes I am vegan, but eating meat is, in many cases, a culturally ingrained practice which people need time to understand the harms of. AI is not culturally ingrained for anyone with an actual culture. People need to eat - it shouldn’t be meat, but I’m not going to shame people for not seeing their harm yet. People do not need to generate slop. I am going to bully all AI users.
Do you think AI is mostly generating slop? Only like 5% of AI use is private individuals.
The point is that this is not actually an ecological hazard the way people say it is, and that there are much, much more pressing issues if we’re going to fix the environment. Literally all we would have to do to solve global warming is stop eating meat. You see anywhere near as much about that as you do datacenters? Which cause less than one percent of the environmental issues of meat?
I know all AI is an ecological hazard and none of its use cases aside from very narrow medical and scientific applications justify using it at all.
People have been eating meat longer than humans have had languages. Your whataboutism is boring and irrelevant. Just because there are other, larger, necessary steps to take doesn’t mean we need to act as unpaid apologists for technocultists shooting our species in the foot while we try to get there. Fuck your AI.
Just in defence of your point:
I prefer to self host, and am in the process of setting up my entire system to run off solar (tiny 2x250 watt solar array, 3 deep cycle 100Ah marine batteries and sundry equipment).
End to end, my AI rig - a BC-250 (a cut down PS5, basically) consumes 50w standby / 200w on inference and can run Qwen 3.6-27b (Ternary Bonsai specifically, about par with Sonnet 4.6 on the AAII) at good speeds (~30 tok/s)
With a smart power plug and Raspberry pi (uses about 5w) as the pilot fish, I can run my entire system “off grid”, to say nothing of the excess solar that accumulates (several days battery back up to run home router, pi server, hard drive array and 2-3hrs daily of inference).
For $1500 AUD, “Poor man’s Sonnet 4.6 at home” ain’t nothing to sneeze at.
Outside of folks such as myself, this blog post may be of interest -
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-bad-for
Don’t eat beef, the animals I eat would use the stuff no matter what.
If every human ate wild meat, the last calorie of wild animals would be consumed before the end of the first afternoon of the first day.
I mean you could say the same thing about YouTube being unnecessary and wasting power.
Yes, I could, and then I’d look very stupid and annoying, so I won’t.
Use of Youtube isn’t spiking fossil fuel consumption to an appreciable extent like AI is.
Then you can also just as well skip that extra step and just do it yourself
I could have always skipped the dewey decimal card catalog and just read the entire library but I’m not mycroft fucking holmes. You don’t have to use a search engine, you can just follow hyperlinks until you find the content you’re looking for.
The fact that people think LLMs should be trusted as a starting point is heartbreaking to me.
But why? If you try to be objective, how is this any different from an op Ed or other published article? Those are good starting points as well, but also shouldn’t be published as your work or trusted as is.
The problem with LLMs is not when people use them as a tool, but when they use inappropriately, blindly trust them or treat them as a final result instead of thinking, reviewing, or adding value.
An article has context. Who published it? What else has the author written? Llm articles strip that all out.
I can’t speak for all LLMs but the ones I use
- web based LLM cites its sources. You can just click
- coding LLM tends to have obvious sources (for example if I tell it to use a vendor API to do something, I know there’s API documentation as the source of truth and the script is just like the example I would previously have found on StackOverflow.com).
And yes, I frequently check its work and iterate through telling it to
no its true. ChatGPT is confidently wrong all the time, but I find its wrong in ways I can learn from anyway. I ask the question. it gets the answer wrong. But its wrong in a useful way where I actually learn more by correcting it than just getting the right answer.
I could get the same experience from talking to a person for much less money though
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They tend to work much better when you point them at things. Hallucination rates go way, way down when they aren’t pulling from their “memory.” They are, also, like you say, wrong in ways that are noticeable and often “interesting” in the Ibsen way. I also doubt that you could get the same experience for less money. I’d have to go back to college to get the education I’m getting with AI. At least community college. It’s a lot of near-experts at once. And when you point it at expert literature it basically is a senile college professor. But yeah the senile part of that statement is pretty important.
Hes supposed to be a credible source, hes an educator, hes the modern day Bill Nye.
There are no credible sources on YouTube. He’s just a guy with a computer and a camera. Youtube is about selling you stuff, people need to accept that.
The beauty of YouTube is that the goals of the company are not necessarily the goals of the content creators.
I’ll take any chance I can get to shout out Nick Zentner. Hes a professor of Geology at Central Washington University and he has been posting full length lectures on YouTube for more than 15 years. He is a comprehensive expert in his field and regularly features experts in related fields to help discuss whatever topic he is on at the time.
I used to use his videos to fall asleep, but I have developed a genuine love of geology and vulcanology that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.
A hyper rational take.
You can find some older, rare exceptions, but it is impossible to maintain integrity and fulfill the YouTube algorithms. People think YouTube content is credible because YouTube algorithms give you what you want to hear.
Great starting point for wasting time maybe.
Let me waste 5 minutes reading slop than another 20 min tying to figure out if its a hallucination or just not accurate. 25 minutes that could have been reading a credible accurate source…
In the scenario, what pointed you towards said credible accurate source? Google?
Not op, but a search engine is a better starting point than an LLM, because it is a predictable tool, fetching internet resources which can be evaluated on their merits.
The AI presents itself as the actual information.
I see too many people in my daily life saying “the ai summary said…” and it is worse than useless.
A page rank based search engine would still require a vetting of results.
Google is mostly AI currated results, it will push approved and sponsored souces.
Google is shit.
Google is a search engine, not a source.
what pointed you
Yes, that was implied.
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.
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!
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?
I’m really anxious and need to feel useful to feel calm (getting better).
But the thought of using LLM output and calling it my work makes me far more anxious.
His response on reddit pretty clearly illustrates what I was talking about.
“As for the "why don’t you just make less!
No one is making you do this!" I’m not sure that’s how I work. I’ve been feeling the pressure of “Oh, I have this little video idea, I need to get it out real fast so I can get to the more important stuff” and I create when I feel that pressure.
…
But mostly 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 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.
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.
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!
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.
That’s just not true.
his brother wrote a book on climate change, they should talk to each other
Perhaps over video logs they send to each other periodically…
That’s quite exactly what I was snarkly referring to. You’re pretty quick.
Hank talks climate change all the time at length.
I don’t usually comment on stuff like this but I feel like people should know that “standby” mode on appliances takes up about 40% more power than every data center on earth, of which only about 33% of which goes to AI. There are DEFINITELY environmental concerns surrounding data centers but it’s more about shoddily, quickly built ones rather than them existing at all.
And how’s progress on that front?
I don’t think there’s any progress on that front. Probably due to the lack of think pieces on it.
I don’t understand your argument? And seems a stupid well this exists so building more datacenters to use more power is OK.
It is attempting to provide scale and perspective for a threat that is massively overblown in the public’s perception.
I’m always shocked by how LLM illiterate professionals or even leading “science influencers” are.
…But I know why.
It’s on purpose
Literally everything about the most common (Big Tech) interfaces obfuscates everything about them, to the maximum degree, to present them as “sycophantic oracles” and maximize engagement. If that’s all one is exposed to, there is literally no way to get a cold ass bucket of water in the face by peeking under the hood.
It’s all very… anti science.
On a semi related note, see this absolutely unhinged but not wrong rant:
The Conspiracy Against High Temperature Sampling
https://gist.github.com/Hellisotherpeople/71ba712f9f899adcb08b94bce20d5397
It is related. Anyone, even Hank Green, will rely on AI more if they never get a chance to poke it and peel it apart.
Like, if I ware in charge of a university, I would mandate a course where everyone gets a untuned base model in raw completion mode, and gleefully watch the slow realization. “Wait… all “AI” is just this?”
I don’t even get the true positives, true negative, false positive and false negative for an llm classification task that they claim works wow!!
Its all marketing bullshit.
christ this comment section is unhinged
I like that everyone can agree with this comment, regardless of which side they’re on.
Glad he’s recognizing the problem and trying to get help. Instant gratification is a hell of a drug.
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.
I don’t hate all LLMs/ML models/“AI”.
I also don’t use them. I also don’t see a need to use them.
I work in tech and these “AI” things are little more than averaging the most common replies to a given input. Any question that’s been asked, especially those that are asked often, is well suited for an LLM chat bot. That’s good if you want a high level overview of a topic that you don’t know much about. If you want accuracy, you’ll need to dig a bit more, but overall, you’ll get a relatively good idea of the answer you’re looking for. That’s enough for most people.
I’m crazy. I like to deeply understand everything, so the high level, lack of detail, finesse, and accuracy of LLM chat bots is unacceptable for me, so I trend towards doing my own research. If I use an LLM at all, it’s just an augmented search engine. I’m more interested in its references than its response.
There’s also something to be said about making short clips of impossible things that some smaller YouTubers are using “AI” models for. Things that would take a long time for a graphics artist to create, and an editor to composite. Stuff that a small time YouTuber can’t really afford, but they can get good enough but clearly “AI” visuals to spice things up in their videos. The AI is just for display during transitions, it doesn’t affect the content being made in any meaningful way. I’ve seen Paul Hibbert do this a lot and his production team from what I know is basically him and his wife. I’m not even sure if he has an editor, or if he does it himself. He’ll go from a live shot of him talking about a product, do an AI transition, to another live shot of him continuing his discussion. Rather than a cut, or some kind of fade, wipe, or other simplistic transition, the generated images are of him, and only to add visual flavor. He also does some AI generated music stuff, which again, fair. He’s not exactly a musician, and unless he has the money to hire a musician, he either uses AI for the funny transition music or he uses an unrelated and unlicensed (or open licensed) song… It just adds flavor to his content, it builds on what he’s creating, it doesn’t shape what he’s creating. All of his scripts sound genuine, not AI created, so everything should be fine.
That, to me, is a good use of AI as a tool.
There’s too many bad examples for me to really cover them in any detail, but I’m sure everyone has seen the AI generated person being animated by AI, reading an AI generated script, using an AI generated voice sample. Even if the original source material is legit, is buried under so many layers of slop that I can’t bear to watch it.
For me, it entirely depends on what he’s using it for. It’s entirely not about the fact that he uses it. I’ll have to dig into it a bit to see what he’s doing, but from the comments I’ve read so far, it seems like the answer to what he’s using it for, is yes. He’s using it for everything… Not ideal.
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Nuanced? The “it just repeats existing answers” is utter nonsense, no way to take that person serious.
