Hank Green’s anti-AI AI psychosis

Last week, YouTube long-hauler Hank Green was accused of using AI to write a script for one of his new videos. The tell, according to one user, was the line, “I appreciate the pushback,” which he says to himself in the video. Viewers suspected it was a note from a chatbot that Green had mindlessly read off a teleprompter.

In a now deleted post on X, Green explained that he didn’t use ChatGPT to write the script, but he did use it “for research” and that the video definitely had “an AI feel.” Over on the r/nerdfighters subreddit, the hub for Green’s fandom across projects, he said he wasn’t a “pure AI-hater,” but acknowledged that his AI use had become unhealthy, that he felt pressured by deadlines, and that he needs to take a break.

Green’s fans have not taken this particularly well. They see Green’s AI use as especially egregious because of how outspoken he’s been about making good, quality educational content over the years. The fact that Green is also such a fervent environmentalist that his Reddit username is u/ecogeek only makes his AI use a worse look.

Even though his fans have spent the weekend rehashing arguments about the ethics of AI use — it’s bad for the environment, it steals from artists, authors, and researchers, it supports a fascist oligarchy, it makes stupid boring garbage, etc. — I actually think there’s a more interesting takeaway here. Something illustrator Megan Ruiz touches on in a response video she made about the Green drama. “You were up against a deadline,” Ruiz asks. “Are we putting out things for the sake of it or are we putting out things on the internet because we want to educate or inform people?”

Another YouTuber, Carthu's Dojo, made a similar point, writing on X, “The fact someone like Hank Green was getting dopamine hits from using an LLM should be eye opening for a lot of people. These things make you feel better, smarter, and more knowledgable than you actually are and they feed off that.”

I’m going to ignore everyone — including Green — talking about “dopamine hits” because I think that shit is stupid and not real. But there clearly is an obsessive impulse that chatbots like ChatGPT feed into.

I’ve used both ChatGPT and Claude quite a bit. Never for writing though, to be clear, because they both suck at it. I mainly use them to troubleshoot ultra-specific tech problems I run into (which they suck slightly less at.) Each platform has a different way of encouraging compulsive use. From my experience, ChatGPT likes to treat you like a genius and is more inclined to hallucinate to keep you engaging with it, while Claude likes to dangle solutions that almost work, but inevitably don’t quite solve the problem or complete the project. Which is why hardcore ChatGPT users start to think they’re interdimensional Jesus and Claude users start to think they can code an app version of interdimensional Jesus. But there’s one thing generative AI chatbots encourage more than anything else. Something someone like Green would be extremely susceptible to: Creating social media content.

Imagine you ran a company that wanted to replace every magazine, newspaper, radio station, TV channel, and movie studio. And imagine you wanted to do that in every country on Earth simultaneously. And imagine you realized you could make a lot more money than those industries ever did if you didn’t pay anyone to make all of that content. But there’s a problem. Your billions of unpaid user-workers, across vastly differently-sized economies around the world, need to keep making content and that content needs to be just good enough that advertisers don’t complain. So imagine you create a product that those same user-workers have to pay for the privilege of using that constantly pressures them to stay productive, and has all the tools they might need to make passable internet content. Problem solved!

I’d go so far as to say that without social media — or, rather, the need to compulsively post on social media, to be digitally productive — there’d be almost no reason for generative AI to exist at all. Whether it’s because of all the social media content these tools were trained on or because they were built by many of the same companies that created social platforms, chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude really want you to make stuff. And the unspoken anxiety driving the feeling that you must always be making stuff is a fear that you are simply not doing enough. And if you dig deep into why so many people feel that way, you will find the answer is social media every time. You must always be posting. To stay in people’s minds, to stay in good standing with the platforms, to take another whack at the slot machine that is the attention economy. I watch Green’s videos and I’ve definitely noticed the same mania I, myself, have felt so many times begin to crop up. A new project, a new initiative, a new video, a new post, a new company, new, new, more, more.

A human collaborator would tell you to slow down — Green admits his brother, author John Green, was worried about him — but an AI has no incentive to do the same. It will mindlessly keep pushing you to keep engaging with it as every human around you thinks you’re losing your mind.

Last month, a rapper named Fenix Flexin released a song titled, “RUBBERZ.” Accusations that the song was created by an AI have gotten louder and louder as it’s climbed the streaming charts. It has 7.4 million views on YouTube and it’s sitting at number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 right now.

A musician going by Medasin went viral on TikTok over the weekend, claiming that Fenix used an AI service called Treblo to generate the song. And it definitely has a lot of the hallmarks of an AI-generated song. The one that I still go by is the bass. AI doesn’t seem to understand how bass parts work, so they typically meander all over the song. Which is certainly the case with “RUBBERZ.”

But there’s so more evidence that this song was spit out of an AI. First, Fenix Flexin has literally never made a song like this ever lmao. All of his other stuff is pretty standard hip hop. Second, you can listen to a live version here. I am very comfortable saying he, uh, had some help making it. And, third, when he first shared the song, it had the word “Sonauto” in the file name, which is what Treblo used to be called.

Fenix’s team shared the Pro Tools session for the song, which was meant to prove that that they made the song themselves, but I wouldn’t call it airtight proof. Treblo can export stems (different instrument tracks) and the Pro Tools session actually shows that the instrumental tracks haven’t been edited at all. Only the vocals were edited. So if I had to guess, I’d say they had the AI spit out the different tracks, tried to humanize them, and put them through a mastering process.

If they were going to do all that work, the least they could have done is ask the AI to generate a better song!

You’re probably noticing a theme in today’s issue lol. Last week, OpenAI’s Sam Altman posted one of the most depressing things I’ve ever read in my life. “Cool use case of chatgpt work i heard last night: Connect your family calendars and explain your kids' interests,” he wrote on X. “Every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid's soccer game that afternoon, one kid's upcoming birthday, some news, etc.”

Not to be outdone, however, Nicholas Charriere, the CEO of AI startup Mocha, shared a new project he’s been working on. He recorded his toddler having a sleepover with another toddler and asked an AI to analyze the audio. “Gave the very long recording to Claude, built a private webpage for the whole family with the audio split into clips, all named and trimmed,” he wrote.

Don’t do either of these things! Get AI away from your children. Jesus Christ.

Also, while we’re on the subject, you should also not do whatever the hell Mario Lopez did here with a video of his 19-year-old niece. He’s thankfully deleted the video, but you can check out a copy of it here.

OpenAI invited a whole bunch of influencers to Wildflower Farms in upstate New York for an “adult summer camp.” And it seems like the influencers involved didn’t totally anticipate how their glowing posts about their AI would be received when they hit people’s feeds. Allow me to give you a sampling of what the comments on these posts are like.

Influencer Grace McCarrick did an, uh, unready?-with-me video about the trip. (It’s like her getting ready to go to bed and stuff.) One of the top comments was especially brutal, with one user writing, “Grace, I know this is exciting for you and you probably never expected to get the opportunity. But as a longtime follower please take time to assess your direction and this decision.” If you click over and check out that comment section, you’ll see that McCarrick is fighting with her audience about this, which is probably not the best move.

Another influencer, Colin Rocker, who specializes in like HR-friendly hustle bro-adjacent stuff, posted about his time at the OpenAI summer camp and was similarly roasted in the comments. “The irony of being out in nature learning about the tool that will eventually, and is currently, destroying our plant,” one user wrote.

And, finally, another lifestyle influencer named Nat Lucyy decided to make a video bragging about how nice the pajama set is that OpenAI gifted her. To which one user replied, “Me sitting here worrying about the data center we are fighting in our neighborhood but go ahead and enjoy your cute pj's. 🙄”

On a recent episode of the podcast Stavy’s World, actor Jake Johnson told comedian Stavros Halkias that he talks to an AI chatbot every morning about his dreams. People are also not very happy about this either!

I saw Drew Coffman, the crypto social lead for Andreessen Horowitz, try and argue that it’s “transgressive” for a celebrity to admit they use AI. This is a very insidious little turn of phrase and I suspect we’re going to see more of it.

As AI usage becomes something fewer and fewer people will be comfortable admitting they use, Silicon Valley reactionaries will absolutely try and spin it as something edgy and dangerous. It will not work in the long term, the same way none of their messaging and would-be social engineering really sticks, but it will mean that in approximately five months, there’s going to be an extremely tedious national conversation about whether or not using an AI is actually the new punk rock.

P.S. here’s a good Instagram Reel.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***