This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
Agreed, this is new technology for everybody, we're allowed growing pains.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
A polemic article that personally insults Hank Green instead of laying out a case. Brain melting AI psychosis indeed.
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.
It's not from my understanding he was using AI for semantic search to find paper to research
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.
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 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.”
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.
Glad he's recognizing the problem and trying to get help. Instant gratification is a hell of a drug.
People need to chill the fuck out
it's more fun to flip out over random harmless bullshit than stuff that actually matters though.
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‘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.
when he messed up was when he pissed off the crochet and knitter crowd. 😂
his brother wrote a book on climate change, they should talk to each other
