this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
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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.
Honestly it sounds like, which I think might be worse, that he's been using it so much that he's picked up its mannerisms of speech. From his own description of the confrontations his wife and family had with him, it sounds like he's been talking to it a lot on his own time.
Gotta agree, it's a testament to how addicting that type of validation is that he's finding it addictive as "a source of dopamine". He's always struck me as pretty level headed in my (admittedly limited) watching of him, and he's clearly a smart guy. Reminds me of how nobody is totally immune to forces like advertising and predatory stuff like gambling.
I find that funny because ai cliches actively make me cringe. I think if you’re using ai a lot you’ll actively talk differently from it and you won’t write like it.
I think if he said anything that sounds like AI it’s because it was, and he’s hiding that fact with this excuse.
I appreciate that pushback (/s), although honestly if you (like myself) find AI-tells like that cringe, you're almost certainly not the type of person using it addictively.
There's a pretty strong body of research that lots of people are subconsciously picking up language patterns from AI, such as the increased prevalence of words like "delve". It's the basic social mirroring we do to pick up language from anyone we talk to, only weirdly twisted because the thing so many people are talking to isn't human.
"I appreciate that pushback" isn't a commonly complained enough tell that people would be intentionally avoiding it, I find it pretty believable that a heavy AI user would unironically use it in a Q&A.
I honestly think it's hard to know.
I actively dislike AI and so its formulations are cringe to me. But it seems unsurprising that someone that enjoys using AI would pick up some of its mannerisms, whether consciously or not. This is of course ugly and depressing, as they're essentially borrowing from a piece of software what would normally be imported from culture.
But I think it's plausible that Hank actually formulated that part himself - the guest did after all "push back" on his claim that all words are made up and immediately after the cliche he presents a more nuanced elaboration of his original claim.
It does feel quite awkward because he cuts in so many qualifications and elaborations in-between that by the time we get to that part we're like "what pushback?".
I also don't recall him having actually explicitly made this excuse, though I'm open to being wrong on that part, I don't follow him anywhere except yt.
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.
And that‘s exactly the problem. Somehow this guy has earned a lot of trust and he wasn‘t handling that trust very well. That‘s why people who stand for something like him, should be held accountable and to higher standards than say your aunt posting AI cats with hats in the family group chat.
His recent history puts him at the bottom of the list of people I would trust regarding AI.
His quote from the article:
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.
Ohh jesus, that video (the one with nate soares) was actually the first hank green video i watched (wasnt aware of either them at the time). Though what i remember from my reaction i was mainly pissed off that the video is called "chatgpt isnt smart. Its something much weirder" and than basically doesnt discuss matters of intelligence or similiarities/ differences between human intellect and machine "intellect" at all. Instead we got this worthless moneyquote "this is alchemy" from soares, which even made it onto the thumbnail.
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/
Echo the other commenter, wow this dude can write.
It's sad, I noticed this too. I excitedly clicked a Hank Green video about energy and water usage on datacenters and was SUPER disappointed in it. I've worked in energy generation as an engineer for a while, and some of the takes in that video were so obviously big tech's doomerism rhetoric
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.
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.