Photo: Hank Green via YouTube
When Hank Green ad-libbed the phrase “I appreciate the pushback” in a longer discussion about kiki and bouba in his July 29 Ask Hank Anything video, there’s no way he could have known the phrase would launch a thousand ships, so to speak. A week later and there’s been a whole investigation into the YouTuber and author for use of generative AI in his videos, writing, and research across multiple YouTube channels and books. Over the weekend, Green, alongside his critics and fans, unpacked his increased reliance — as an author but also as a scientist — on LLMs and what that means for his output on his various YouTube channels. The niche controversy has forced the Nerdfighters — a.k.a. the Green brothers’ fandom — to reckon with the harms of artificial intelligence. Here’s how this all spiraled out of one simple phrase.
Kind of. You’re probably thinking about John Green, Hank’s brother, who wrote a number of novels, including Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns, and The Fault in Our Stars, all of which have been adapted. Hank has also written novels, though in the grand scheme of their public relationship, he’s considered the more right-brained side of their overall operation.
The Green brothers are longtime YouTubers, initially posting under the account Vlogbrothers, where they would release alternating four-minute-long videos as a form of communication with each other beginning in 2007. The success of Vlogbrothers led the Greens to expand their network to include several educational channels that specialize in subjects of their individual areas of focus. There is a wholesome quality to their videos, and many of their fans consider them consistently upstanding when it comes to the world of content creation.
On Green’s personal YouTube channel? No. The sentence in question occurred when Green appeared in a Complexly AHA — that’s Ask Hank Anything — with content creator Soupytime.
Green runs Complexly along with his brother John as a hub for a number of their other educational video channels, like SciShow, Crash Course, and the Art Assignment.
Soupytime, a.k.a. Georgie Sims, and Green were riffing on words being made up, and Green asserted that “all words were made up!” with some degree of lighthearted force. Soupytime countered that kiki and bouba — the made-up words that link visual shape and arbitrary sound — defy this phenomenon, at which Green gets somewhat flustered and overwhelmed that the conversation jumps around so much before punting this issue to “Future Hank,” or a cutaway that would allow him to explain his reasoning about all words being “made up” or not further. At one point during the Future Hank segment, Green used the phrase “and I appreciate the pushback,” presumably referring to his confrontational attitude with Soupytime during their conversation.
Fans speculated that Green used ChatGPT to write the Future Hank segment specifically because of his use of “I appreciate the pushback,” which is a phrase common with Claude.
In a response to a now-deleted tweet asking about his use of AI, Green replied in another now-deleted tweet that this video — in which he and Soupytime discuss why Coke Zero has no calories — was produced “under a lot of pressure, and that he used ChatGPT for research purposes and generating notes, though his line about appreciating the pushback was ad-libbed.
Not well. This incident came a few days after Green was accused of using an AI-generated image in one of his science videos. Green himself said that when he saw the graphic in his video, he thought, Ew, gross, a reaction he found to be in line with that of many of his fans. In response, the most upvoted comment was one that acknowledged that Green was “a very busy person doing Too Many Things.”
Most of the fans responded to Green’s admission of using ChatGPT for research and note consolidation by homing in on him saying his Complexly AHA was produced under a lot of pressure, if only because the pressure is largely self-imposed. “The thing that gets me about this is that complexly and such have researchers! They are credited all the time! No hate Hank, but if the pressure to make a video is too much that you can’t use a human researcher, we don’t need the video,” wrote one commenter on Reddit. For someone like Green, whose opinions are often seen as good in the world of technology and science, to be using AI, which is frequently judged by fans of the Greens for its climate and labor impacts, caused something of a reckoning in the overall community, though Green himself has admitted that he has quite neutral views on AI.
Green wrote a lengthy response in the same Reddit thread in which his fans discussed his initial answer to the AI question on Twitter. In his reply, he admitted that he had “been relying too heavily on AI as a research aid.” He went on to add that, “You need to know that my words are mine. I don’t think that this hasn’t been true, but I’ve been moving so fast that my own process isn’t actually clear to me.” Green also said he needs to reckon with “the level of dopamine” that he gets from “interacting with LLMs” and that neither his wife, Katherine, nor his brother, John, “pulled any punches” about his behavior being healthy. What he promised the community is that he would commit to less output on both his personal channel and hobby channels. Green also said he was “very sorry for harming the thing this is all based on.”
Things are a bit shaky still in Nerdfighteria. Fans continue to grapple with Green’s not-quite-anti-AI stance, which bucks up against the community’s, as well as his additional uses of the technology. Despite all that, Green seems to be relatively level-headed, writing that he knows the dogpile is coming from a “good place.” He opted against posting this week’s obligatory vlogbrothers video, which was probably for the best.
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