If Even Hank Green Uses AI, What Hope Is There For the Rest of Us?

We have certain expectations and stereotypes over who we think would use generative AI in lieu of creating their own work: smarmy tech bros, your bored aunt on Facebook, clickbait mongers, the shredded remains of Sam Altman’s dignity. It might be that we don’t really know or want to acknowledge just how prevalent the technology of the plagiarism machine has become in a dizzyingly short period of time. Workplaces are mandating its use, even when it doesn’t work. Respected publications are replacing editors and writers with slop. And now, one of the defining voices of millennial online life has admitted to not only using AI but becoming dependent on it. We are boned.

Hank Green, YouTuber and author, has been a beloved figure to a certain online generation for many years. He and his brother John Green were early adopters of YouTube and turned their Vlog Brothers series into a bona fide empire. The pair do a ton of edutainment content for their company Complexly, which has endured even as their YouTube contemporaries fell out of fashion. And yes, he admits to using AI in the creation of his educational videos. In a now-deleted tweet, Green replied to someone asking if he was reading from an LLM-generated text in a recent video. He denied that part but acknowledged that he uses LLM notes, and that the video has an “AI feel.” After a massive fan outcry, he issued a lengthy apology on Reddit.

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While saying he felt “mortified that I have let so many people down”, he admitted that “I have been relying too heavily on AI as a research aid. It can be very useful for this task, giving me access to a lot of papers I didn’t know existed really fast, but I think that has been to the detriment of my work because it has not given me the freedom to find all of my own ways into and around a topic.” He continued, “I have been using AI to locate papers and other resources for learning about topics. You are still getting my takes based on what I read, know, and learn.”

Green has faced pushback from a lot of fans over what many see as a fence-sitting approach to the topic of AI and data centres. He sort-of addresses that here:

“I’m not a pure AI-hater, which people in the AI industry know, so when I say that the way these models were trained deeply disturbs me, that lands differently. When I say that I think that the speed at which these companies are trying to consolidate economic power should freak out everyone in the world, that’s coming from someone who has “nuanced takes.” When I say I worry about the climate impacts of this rollout, that is not me saying, “I don’t think this tech should ever exist” it’s me saying, “for god’s sake please don’t make our biggest problem worse.” It is very likely that you (the reader) and I disagree on how or even whether AI should be used. I think it makes sense for that disagreement to exist. But I have also always believed that my audience is more likely to be right than I am. You know what this feels like in a way I can’t. And I am so sorry for diluting myself in this way and harming the thing that we have all built together.”

He admitted that he needed “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.” So, he’ll be stepping back from creating YouTube videos for a while. You can read the entire apology here.

I’m not even a Vlog Brothers fan and this depressed the hell out of me. How do you go from being someone who has spent literal decades making fun, informative, and community-driven work and fostering a fanbase around that, only to suddenly find yourself dependent on an LLM? It’s certainly a symbol of just how addictive (by design) this technology is. Two years ago, I saw nobody using AI and all of a sudden I feel as though reams of people have grown dependent on it for the most mundane of tasks. What do you mean you can’t organise your schedule without AI? How did you fall so low? “I was talking about this with Katherine last night and she did not pull any punches. Frankly, neither did John. Neither of them think I’ve been being healthy. I need to readjust,” Green wrote in his apology. How bad did it get with the stuff we didn’t notice?

It feels particularly galling with Hank Green, who has cultivated a fandom that 100% has no time for AI slop, and he seemingly wasn’t aware of how bad this would look to them. His fans noticed the change in tone and vocabulary pretty quickly. You can’t build up a unique style for all that time and then expect a jarring shift to go unnoticed. But that’s also what the loser CEOs forcing this tech into our lives want. They need you to accept mediocrity, or even outright falsehoods, because positive change would go against their entire business model. It’s not just mediocrity of content but of users. The enshittification of everything is built on a sandcastle foundation of increasingly lowered expectations.

Green admitting to his AI use is at least something. I see people on social media posting Midjourney slop and acting as though they directed The Odyssey. But the problem with falling into the trap is that it makes it near impossible for anyone to ever trust you again. Green may say he only used AI for notes and gathering research, but when he also admits that his own wife and brother thought he’d gone too deep into addiction, can we believe that? How many people will now watch the past two years of Vlog Brothers and related content and wonder if every slight slip or moment of innocent human error is a ChatGPT hallucination? Hank Green’s work and fortune is built on his words. To find out they’re not all his? That’s tough to walk back from.

I don’t think Green will lose any business opportunities from this. He’s a beloved white dude on YouTube who’s got enough good work in his corner to prove he’s capable of change. It does feel worth noting how the scant handful of people receiving pushback or repercussions for alleged AI use have not been white. The Atlantic dedicated a bizarre article to the new novel Daggermouth by H.M. Wolfe and unbased accusations that it was written using AI. Their “evidence” for that is conjecture and an AI checker that, shock horror, uses AI. Last week, a high-profile seven figure publishing deal for a debut novel was abruptly cancelled after the writer’s agents expressed doubts that the author had written it himself. The writer in question, Jerry Falade, had been at the centre of a 14-way bidding war for his book, Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body. He denied using AI but, according to his agent, “aspects of his story changed” and the agency decided to cut ties, citing the “need to have total faith.” The only major book pulled from circulation due to suspected AI use, Shy Girl by Mia Ballard, was also credited to a Black woman.

Anyone who uses AI to “write” their work is a hack and I have no desire to read anything they churn out. But it’s also true that publishing is currently bending over backward to integrate AI into its workforce, and that many writers, self-published and traditionally published, admitted proudly to using AI. James Frey used it in his latest book and didn’t lose a dime (his entire career is a testament to audacity and white male privilege.) Is the industry only a-okay with the theft machine when it’s used by those with all the wealth and power, all in the name of accruing more of both?

How do we begin to wrangle this beast whose rotten dominance we have been told is inevitable and unchangeable? Maybe it starts with people like Hank Green walking away from the dopamine rush of easy content. But that’s a drop in the ocean as we find ourselves surrounded by slop, data centres, and chatbot delusions. Being Team Human is an endless fight against mandatory inanity.