this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
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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’ve only really run in to him when he caused grief with the knitting community with a video that had a bunch of misinformation and talking down to knitters („women have been doing this highly technical thing without maths education for hundreds if not thousands of years, here’s a bunch of male scientists to explain what they already know in more formalised and unnecessary language to them“). His reaction to the community‘s criticism soured me on him.
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.
seems likes barely useful outside of medical field too. in that article/study, they had to use alot of scans from different people, and doctors reviews to even get a "diagnosis", seems like a fluke they even found the "surprise cancer". i dont think patients/ people are ready to let an AI diagnose people, on off chance it makes a fake diagnosis,. which is why we barely hear stem use of it.
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.
Then you can also just as well skip that extra step and just do it yourself
This. Research that always has to be fully confirmed hasn't actually been done in the first place.
Solving problems by brute force don't make economic sense to me.
Using an automation tool you can only trust for subjective tasks makes even less sense to me.
I find that a frontier bot pointed at the internet does a lot better job of answering the question than I do when searching on my own. I mean they're always going to be wrong about some stuff, but aren't people? I think that's generally a better metric. And at this point they're far away from what they were just a few years ago. But you're correct in that there is an element of brute forcing them or at least shaping them that has to occur that I can't blame anyone for tapping out of.
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
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.
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.
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.
A hyper rational take.
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?
Google is a search engine, not a source.
Yes, that was implied.