I’m always shocked by how LLM illiterate professionals or even leading “science influencers” are.
…But I know why.
It’s on purpose
Literally everything about the most common (Big Tech) interfaces obfuscates everything about them, to the maximum degree, to present them as “sycophantic oracles” and maximize engagement. If that’s all one is exposed to, there is literally no way to get a cold ass bucket of water in the face by peeking under the hood.
It’s all very… anti science.
On a semi related note, see this absolutely unhinged but not wrong rant:
The Conspiracy Against High Temperature Sampling
https://gist.github.com/Hellisotherpeople/71ba712f9f899adcb08b94bce20d5397
It is related. Anyone, even Hank Green, will rely on AI more if they never get a chance to poke it and peel it apart.
Like, if I ware in charge of a university, I would mandate a course where everyone gets a untuned base model in raw completion mode, and gleefully watch the slow realization. “Wait… all “AI” is just this?”
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.
I think this is very honest and we shouldn’t give someone shit for speaking up.
This. AI and more generally algorithm dependence is an addiction and watching him struggle with it the past few years has been heartbreaking. Watching him try to bargain and rationalize an objectively misanthropic technology that grew out of a sphere that he was a major role in and did begin as an objectively beautiful attempt at building community and healthy dialogue is very disappointing. I don’t hate or judge him. He tried to do something beautiful. He just didn’t understand the Faustian bargain he made in the process. The systemic forces turning his work into poison.
I don’t judge him for wrestling with it. I’m sad for him. I’m sad for a lot of us. We’re all working in a system that’s slowly killing us to some degree or another. There is no ethically clean life in a system predicated on greed, gluttony and lies. His optimism may have slipped into delusional, but it beats the crushing cynicism that comes with naked realism.
I don’t think that we should lose hope, but the future can’t look like this. His Icarus moment shouldn’t be the end of his journey. I hope he finds himself and begins planting new seeds even if none of us ever live to see the shade of the trees that grow from them.
Well said
But this is the first time there’s been this significant of an impact on one’s mental health(?) I’m unsure. It’s so easy to get caught up in that dopamine hit where you feel like you did something. Its even more frustrating when you’re forced to use it in work regularly, whether directly or indirectly (if you’re coworkers are using it there is an indirect force to use it if you need to stay competitive and keep your job and feed yourself and your loved ones especially if your workspace is not healthy)
Thought experiment: is it better to treat the AI as a contractor (fivver etc) who is doing the task you’re asking rather than thinking of it as something you’re doing? From a mental health perspective A contractor because you are only to talk a out the task and nothing else really. That way it’s work could be more distant and you’re less likely to associate it to your work and boost in productivity?
No. This is a line we cannot cross and if it destroys us, so be it. I’m not against AI, or automation. But not these tools. Not these companies. Not these models. The question is death or death. So we learn to live without, or we die. There is no synthesis possible with this paradigm.
The cats out of the bag, so what are we gonna do now. Like replace that but not this with any other tech you should stop using, say social media, good luck. So what are we going to do now?
What do we do? We’re doing it. We’re asking questions, we’re building communities IRL and in digital paces outside the bounds of the major corps. We use poison pills to make corpos that embrace these systems pay dearly. We give grace to those who sincerely pull back and we move on.
Cocaine exists and it can be a major boost to productivity. But we don’t have to use it. We don’t have to live with its downsides slowly killing us and robbing us of our humanity.
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Yes. He doesn’t want to admit, he’s gone as far down this path as he responsibly can. He doesn’t want to transition to the “producer” role, where he becomes a resource for a new generation that’s seeking a future away from the old platforms.
It’s a bit like the oil man who knows his work enabled so much good, unable to also admit his product has a dark side, and it’s time for us all to move on from it. That times changed and a new world is struggling to be born.
I disagree about “edutainment” in a qualified way. We still need communicators and domain experts sharing their knowledge, and there’s still a great deal of knowledge to share, but I don’t think it’s on YouTube (or TikTok). People talking out of turn on matters so far outside their expertise and experience they’re effectively neophytes, and just as vulnerable to Dunning-Kruger impulses certainly doesn’t help. I don’t think that AI or better algorithms are going to save them either, that’s a good way to end up lost in a psychotic hallucination. I don’t know what it will look like yet but it isn’t going to come from the tech giants. Unless Wikipedia wants to take a crack at it, they might be the only ones that could pull it off.
Agreed, this is new technology for everybody, we’re allowed growing pains.
Its pretty fucking simple to not use it.
Then you’re not critically trying to think and examine the implications of this new technology. And that’s fine, we all can’t do all the things but we can listen to the people around us without being pretentious tools who would say I told you so.
Then you’re not critically trying to think and examine the implications of this new technology.
I’ve been examining and thinking about artificial neural networks since ~2010.
It is pretty fucking simple to not use an LLM.
Good job you’ve literally not reflected on the adoption of tech.
Its pretty fucking simple not to be an unempathetic prick, but here we are.
I’m gonna need someone to empathize with me after I get brain damage from reading these replies.
Gotchu.
There was a point where it was pretty simple not to use the internet, too. This analogy drives a question: were those people who rejected the internet at the beginning better off in the long run, when compared to people who embraced it?
Generative AI can be a very useful productivity tool. Choosing not to use an available tool is “easy”, but is it wise?
I find myself agreeing with the person you responded to; you don’t appear to be thinking critically about the implications of LLMs/generative AI. That, or you are speaking more literally than it seems, and you mean, literally, that it’s easy not to use AI, without commenting on how wise that decision may or may not be.
you don’t appear to be thinking critically about the implications of LLMs/generative AI
You don’t appear to have a functioning brain.
Hyperbolic insults don’t help your case. If you did think critically about this, feel free to show your work and talk through your thought process.
Generative AI is just a tool. Using it is not much different than using a thesaurus while writing. You can quickly tell when someone has over-used the thesaurus, and it affects the quality of the output, but that doesn’t make it bad to use a thesaurus.
I mean, not smoking is also pretty simple. Or not using social media.
It would also have been simple to not use any technology ever that has had controversy around it
But unless you are actively a lodite hermit living in the woods with no connection to the world. In which case your opinion on the topic doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things since clearly you already have a unhealthy relationship with reality.
Learning to have a healthy relationship with new tech is how to actually deal with shit. Not ignoring it forever as if pandoras box wasn’t open.
It’s not going anywhere, even if the bubble pops and all of it dies. Local models will only become more and more common, the tech will only become easier and easier to run and more efficient and effective.
Even if it devolves into a specialist tool for research and science only. That still is going to be something you will have to come to grips with.
The tech is far far more than just chat bots.
Hank Green has earned the right, with me anyway, to have his point of view heard. And frankly he has more credibility with me than the garden variety pitchfork-wielding anti-AI mob. I think Hank is a person who finds AI interesting and sees upsides as well as downsides. But the aforementioned mob is not interested in anything other than the emotional catharsis of railing against something they hate.
Now ask me if the mob is in the room with us, because it probably is.
His AI use caused him so many problems in his private life that his family had to intervene. His point of view is “This technology has had a negative impact on my life and the lives of the people I care about”.
Your pro-AI spiel is a bit tone deaf here
There wasn’t an intervention, he asked them about his AI use in response to the outrage and they agreed he’d been using it unhealthy.
Seemed to me more along the lines of “do I have too much salt?” , “yeah you should cut back” ; Then “your coke problem is tearing this family apart”
He said they “did not pull any punches” which implies it was a more blunt conversation than you’re suggesting.
Hank Green himself describes his relationship with AI the same way you would an addiction, and specifically mentions the dopamine reaction driving his use of it to a point where he became overwhelmed by it.
He’s not describing a casual discussion about table salt, he’s literally describing a drug/alcohol addiction.
I said nothing pro-AI. But by accusing me of that, you reveal where your own bias (and defensiveness) lies. So thanks for that.
You’re also exaggerating the facts. They didn’t stage an intervention. He turned to his wife and brother and said “do you think my AI use is unhealthy?”
You’ve said plenty pro-AI lol. You don’t have to get so defensive about it, just own your position.
I’ve exaggerated nothing. Hank himself said he’s spoken to both his wife and brother about his AI use and said they “didn’t pull any punches”, which implies there was a blunt conversation about it, if not two.
That’s fair. It’s a new technology, we need trusted people to explore it and tell us what their experience was. I don’t think we have very many trusted people left
You sound like you lick Grok and Gippitys silicon balls.
I don’t even know what that second one is, and I wouldn’t touch Xitter with a ten foot turd.
Ok, I guess you were too busy fondling Gr0ks and gipeettys balls to type out a constructive response. Are these how you’d like them to participate in your silicon fetish?
I literally use no AI in my day to day. I try and bully AI users tbh
Good job, now shut the fuck up, adults are talking.
Yeah, part of what I appreciate about him is that he does consistently acknowledge when he fucks up and tries to change.
For me it’s just another disconnected millionaire Youtuber. But he‘s kind of blaming AI or rather his relationship with LLMs for this dilemma instead of actually reflecting on himself. If he thinks simply abstaining from using LLMs will establish a connection to the people he‘s dead wrong and will likely fall back on AI in no time.
Alright, so he got addicted to what felt like an easy source of knowledge. Can happen to anyone.
I guess I’m just tired of finding things to be upset about. I’ve lived more than five decades and it’s been outrage after outrage after outrage.
I’m tired, boss.
He’s admitted there was a problem and it got out of hand. If he changes, what’s the huge deal going forward?
We need social safety nets. We need universal health care. We need to kick fascists out of our government. And sure, we need to fix smaller problems, but jesus christ does every last thing have to be drama?
It depends what you define as drama.
I would say this is just about him breaking his community’s trust in him, and people let him know that. So now he’ll need to work to earn it back.
It isn’t really drama, but I can understand why people would feel a bit betrayed when they find out this person, who presents themselves as a science communicator, was heavily using a machine that is well known for hallucinations and spreading misinformation.
Additionally, Hank himself has said he is deeply concerned about the effects of AI on the climate crisis, the consolidation of economic power, and the way it was trained. Him heavily using it can makes it feel as though he doesn’t care about that stuff as much as it initially appeared. And given his community includes a lot of people heavily worried about the climate crisis, consolidation of economic power, and the theft of artists’ work, I think them being angry at him is understandable and expected.
Of course, hopefully he now steps back and reflects on this, and then comes back better. But that couldn’t happen without someone calling him on it first.
This post deserves more visibility.
5 decade club reporting 🫡 and I’m tired too.
“If it bleeds, it leads.” Drama leads to clicks, clicks lead to advertising, advertising = money. Same ol’ story, its just super easy now with the internet.
Also an old.
The outrage machine has never been anything but a slow drip of poison to keep us too overwhelmed/afraid to see what the oligarch class is doing to us.
Now it’s a fire hose.
Yeah, I feel the response has gotten way out of hand. Sure, I’m not happy about it. But I have some faith Hank will actually reflect on the situation.
he probably needs to take a break from uploading and wait a while.
Taking breaks is not what creators do anymore after a backlash as it kills the channel. He will keep posting stuff. Maybe even ride the anti AI wagon for engagement. He‘s a content creator through and through.
Apparently, that’s become less of an issue lately, at least on YouTube. I follow several creators that have started taking breaks for various reasons and the ones that are open about analytics don’t see a drop from it anymore.
This is an issue I’m seeing more and more of. People are demanding that others be perfect at all times. We all fuck up and make mistakes. If we write off everyone we’ve ever disagreed with as irredeemably bad, then we’re telling people there’s no point in growing and changing.
When I was a kid in the early 90s in Texas, I thought homosexuality was immoral. I was wrong and I’ve spent the last 30 years preaching for inclusion and tolerance. And that’s the story for most people my age. In the 90s, a Democratic President banned openly gay people from being in the military.
If we want to change society, we have to invite others to our side with open arms, not condemn them.
People demand others be perfect so they can live vicariously through them while their own life is a miserable mess. They refuse to have any form of introspective and self acknowledgement of themselves to make their own lives better, so they need others around them to be perfect, even if those others is a para-social relationship with a Youtuber.
Preach.
We need tolerance. Our society has become so dictatorial, even the most left leaning and liberal ones, we simply cannot tolerate anything we don’t agree with.
Everyone wants to make their own perfect universe where everybody says and does one thing. We should accept each other’s mistakes and faults, and live in more harmony.
Yeah I’m with you. I’m disappointed, but everyone will disappoint you in some way some times. Hell I’m disappointed in myself plenty of the time.
I agree, we try our best, but we’ve got to focus on the truly existential issues.
No no I want this one guy to be ahistorically flawless please. That is more important than any major issue like fascist revival movements and/or the climate crisis /s
Hate is an easy way to engage users, that is why most news channels use it as a hook when formatting articles.
I’m tired of it too.
I’m glad I dont know who he is and I will continue to not know him.
These days it seems like the internet is more pleasant the less influencers you know, and most aren’t worth knowing any further about.
I think the past where people’s awareness of public figures was much more distant was a healthier time. Like knowing the famous athlete or actor, but nothing further about their lives and not feeling like “you know them” because they called our your username or liked your comment and not being able to send them a direct message.
He and his brother created tons of online free science material that was used by several high schools apparently. I found him post all that, but it’s understandable that a lot of people have leeway with him, given that he was a big helper in so many places, and that he got cancer.
I mean, look how hostile Lemmy usually is and how tactful they are being with him, he definitely has built some reputation of being a good guy.
What’s scary to me is that Hank Green is a rationale, intelligent person with time, money, resources, etc. Everything someone could want to be successful at their passion. And in this case, the passion is literally explaining science. If his own family has to have an intervention on his AI use (which it seems like they did?) after he denied reciting AI prompts on video despite being caught red-handed (which it seems like he did?) what chance do normie script kiddy vibe coders have? Is this the future? Addicts with rotting brains and AI psychosis leading the planet to destruction?
The allure of outsourcing your mental load to a chat bot designed to tell you exactly what you want to hear is too much. Everyone’s getting high off their own supply.
It must feel godlike to manifest your will simply by speaking it. I can understand why that would addict people. This is exactly why they are pushing it so hard - they know it has this effect, people will demand it, they will fight for it. They will give over their enterprise and their personal lives to it, the way a drug or gambling addict gives over everything they have to it.
With that kind of impact - especially early on, before people realize they’ve been taken - they can build enough momentum to corner all compute.
No longer can we gather or organize without our names attached, without our intent scanned and analyzed, our location tracked, or our wallets closed. We will have to drink our verification cans, and we will have to be nice to Trump, or else they will see what you wrote on your iPad Cloud or your Google Pixel Light and then they will debank you, like waking up from the Matrix. “Go woke and go broke” was always a premonition about control.
I keep those power fantasies to my brain because I can tell the difference between a daydream and reality. I don’t care what AI could make me feel, I am never going to use it for anything if I’m aware of it.
Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better
We’ve been saying that for decades. When does it get better?
Well you see it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
It doesn’t
When gen AI hits a job market that doesn’t exist thanks to AI, I wonder what’s going to happen.
IMO we are still quite a long way off from it, but if/when it does become prevalent it will depend on how fast the greedy capitalists deploy it. If they do it fast enough there will be too many displaced with little to lose, which will lead to revolution.
Those who are the most vulnerable to fall for the cult are a) those who have no safeguards or experience and thus don’t see the signs that it is a cult, and b) those who see the signs and know for a fact it is a cult, but think themselves they can outsmart the cult.
His overconfidence is the reason he is leaning so hard into AI. Because he thinks himself knowledgeable and smart enough to always know better than the AI slop. He is the perfect mark to fall for it.
rational*
That’s what’s wild about this to me - disagreeing about AI usage with someone like Hank Green (and similar public figures) feels so wrong when he and his brother practically saved my ass in highschool w/ Crash Course. But ig none of us are immune to addiction.
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I can understand why this technology would be particularly addicting to hank.
His whole persona is answering questions like “what color flower do bees like the most” with the kind of enthusiasm that shows his curiosity and deep passion for science. So a machine where you can put in those sorts of questions and get an almost instant answer would be very addicting.
But when I get fixated on something, I want the correct answer. I’d hate to learn the wrong answer and repeat it to someone - I’ve done that before and I hate it. That’s why I avoid AI on principle. I want the right answer and AI won’t give that to me about things I know about so I won’t trust it on things I don’t know about.
This is the thing about LLMs and their users I genuinely don’t get. Like, objectively, being able to input plain speech into a computer and get an almost immediate, detailed, 95% accurate answer is incredible. Genuine technological marvel.
But 95% accuracy is functionally useless for all but the most basic, unimportant tasks. Outside of a coding context (a big exception, to be clear), are people really satisfied with that?
The majority of human history at all levels of science, philosophy, and mathematics. The best you could ever hope for was 95%. Hell you were lucky to break 90% accuracy.
Because the only people you could ask questions was the people in the room with you right then and there or the people you could actively physically go ask.
If you were extremely lucky you could write to someone who MIGHT know more. Or may there’s a book about it that someone knows exists.
95% can and frequently is very much over kill for almost everything anyone will need for their day to day life for random trivia or even most important work.
Very few fields need more than that, and few still is it a matter of life or death.
The part that people fuck up is not being open to learning more and being corrected.
Let’s be honest, most sources online are not 100% accurate. Even before LLMs, find any random article about something you’re an expert in, and there was a good chance you’d spot some inaccuracies. Most of the time, those inaccuracies aren’t a big deal, and when they are, you should be consulting an expert for those.
For me personally, I would rate AI accuracy at about 75%. And for some of my use cases, that’s a pretty decent starting point. Things with no consequences, like trying to quickly find the relevant console command for the game I’m playing. I can get instant feedback on whether it gave me correct info, and if not then I hit Google.
I would never trust AI, at least in its current state, to tell me the truth for anything of consequence.
Let’s be honest, most sources online are not 100% accurate.
Most scientific reviews cite papers in which only the title was read, and often the titles are not justified in the papers.
If you can confirm it, it doesn’t matter what percentage is correct.
When solving computer problems, using an LLM to guide you to the correct answer doesn’t even need 95% accuracy. Every step it gives you have to execute manually, so if something is hallucinated you will notice really quickly. And if by the end your problem is solved, then all the hallucinations didn’t matter.
You could do just as well googling Stack Overflow back when Google wasn’t shit.
But now both SO and Google are shit…
You’re immune to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect!
For what he’s trying to do, it’s not even a horrible use-case. But as someone is a ready to go to the mat on fact checking, he’s definitely not anywhere near arduous enough about it.
He’s not treating it like aunt marge. You wouldn’t make a tv show around finding out truth, then go ask your aunt Marge and not follow up on her answers.
AI for general information gives you approximate directions at best, maybe you got a wikipedia page and maybe you’re reading 297 regurgitations of some asshole that didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about on reddit who got reposted over and over.
The best way I’ve seen it put is that ai is the perfected form of the wisdom of the masses. It’s 90% right 90% of the time. But the most important part is the last 10%.
90% is good enough for most things in your day to day life that have no consequences. But it’s like people have forgotten what it was like before smart phones.
Back when your best chance of a good answer was asking who ever was in hear shot if they knew and just accepting that as good enough. You never treated it as fact just as the best answer your going to get at the moment.
For anything important you would go to the damn library.
It’s 90% right 90% of the time. But the most important part is the last 10%.
No LLM model system card claims such high rate as 90%. Fable claims in its system card, what, 40% hallucination rate?
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10791 yep (no Fable score here)
Only they’re not “answers”. AI does not provide information, it tells you what you want to hear. It even makes up fake scientific papers as “references”. So you think your info is backed up by peer reviewed sources. Nope!
Oh they’ll give “answers” alright. They could just be wrong or untethered from reality.
One of my favorite economics bloggers for decades started sourcing his information with LLMs. He was such a bright guy. 😭
The better models absolutely will cite real scientific papers that are relevant to your discussion. It doesn’t hallucinate as a matter of course, it can hallucinate some of the time. You can’t trust what it gives you 100%, you have to verify it. But it very often gives useful answers and information.
It even makes up fake scientific papers as “references”
Broski, it’s not early 2023 anymore. Thinking models with internet access have been able to provide public sources just for over a year now. Technology evolves; shocking, I know…
ok, but they will give you a different answer to a question a day later if you delete previous prompts.
A polemic article that personally insults Hank Green instead of laying out a case. Brain melting AI psychosis indeed.
Thanks, saves time to not read it.
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.
It’s not from my understanding he was using AI for semantic search to find paper to research
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.
Even just the video (before the reaction to criticism) left a super bad taste in my mouth. I remember an aggrieved knitted described their own feelings around it as being that it was easy to enjoy the edutainment material he produces when it was in a topic they were confident he knew more than them on. However, when they saw how shoddy the knitting video was, that made them feel uneasy about even the non-knitting related content, because what if that was as plagued with errors and bias as the knitting video, except they didn’t notice it.
What I was especially salty about with the video is that there was a non-problematic way to say “look at the cool research that involves throwing modern science at ancient textiles crafts” — highlighting research by people like Elisabetta Matsumoto, a physicist and a knitter. I was so hyped when someone reviewing the video mentioned Matsumoto’s research, as I was aware of her research already from being a ridiculous nerd.
I mean this is true of all sources and they should be checked.
He didn’t state what his actual process was. People assume that just means firing out a query and no bothering to check it, he said he uses it to summarize sources to see if they are worth reading. I don’t think that’s unreasonable if he still reads them.
Regarding using it to write scripts, I think if you use LLMs to generate something you are good at making and are picky and opinionated about, the review process very quickly makes you skeptical about the output.
Before the response, IP rights and environmental effects of LLMs are completely valid and are a valid reason for opposing them. Don’t just assume someone’s using it out of laziness instead of in an attempt to scale up their own work.
Papers have an abstract and summary sections SPECIFICALLY for this reason and usually aren’t more than a paragraph; there’s no excuse to use LLM.
I read a decent number of papers. If you’re looking for something specific, and abstract isn’t enough. If you want to research something specific that’s not the core focus of the paper, you at least need to skim it.
If Hank Greene is understaffed, using AI to prefilter papers isn’t a terrible use of the technology.
Addictive behavior often includes being incapable of accurately describing or confronting their usage habits.
I think that’s unreasonable, but that’s just me.
Ok
Facts
You know llm sources are just as verifiable as anything else right? All information is imperfect and has to be verified, period.
Hes supposed to be a credible source, hes an educator, hes the modern day Bill Nye.
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.
A hyper rational take.
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.
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?
Not op, but a search engine is a better starting point than an LLM, because it is a predictable tool, fetching internet resources which can be evaluated on their merits.
The AI presents itself as the actual information.
I see too many people in my daily life saying “the ai summary said…” and it is worse than useless.
A page rank based search engine would still require a vetting of results.
Google is mostly AI currated results, it will push approved and sponsored souces.
Google is shit.
Google is a search engine, not a source.
what pointed you
Yes, that was implied.
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
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.
I could have always skipped the dewey decimal card catalog and just read the entire library but I’m not mycroft fucking holmes. You don’t have to use a search engine, you can just follow hyperlinks until you find the content you’re looking for.
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.
I don’t have a golf course or a membership so
thanks for that irrelevant factoid
and yes I am vegan, but eating meat is, in many cases, a culturally ingrained practice which people need time to understand the harms of. AI is not culturally ingrained for anyone with an actual culture. People need to eat - it shouldn’t be meat, but I’m not going to shame people for not seeing their harm yet. People do not need to generate slop. I am going to bully all AI users.
Do you think AI is mostly generating slop? Only like 5% of AI use is private individuals.
The point is that this is not actually an ecological hazard the way people say it is, and that there are much, much more pressing issues if we’re going to fix the environment. Literally all we would have to do to solve global warming is stop eating meat. You see anywhere near as much about that as you do datacenters? Which cause less than one percent of the environmental issues of meat?
Just in defence of your point:
I prefer to self host, and am in the process of setting up my entire system to run off solar (tiny 2x250 watt solar array, 3 deep cycle 100Ah marine batteries and sundry equipment).
End to end, my AI rig - a BC-250 (a cut down PS5, basically) consumes 50w standby / 200w on inference and can run Qwen 3.6-27b (Ternary Bonsai specifically, about par with Sonnet 4.6 on the AAII) at good speeds (~30 tok/s)
With a smart power plug and Raspberry pi (uses about 5w) as the pilot fish, I can run my entire system “off grid”, to say nothing of the excess solar that accumulates (several days battery back up to run home router, pi server, hard drive array and 2-3hrs daily of inference).
For $1500 AUD, “Poor man’s Sonnet 4.6 at home” ain’t nothing to sneeze at.
Outside of folks such as myself, this blog post may be of interest -
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-bad-for
I know all AI is an ecological hazard and none of its use cases aside from very narrow medical and scientific applications justify using it at all.
People have been eating meat longer than humans have had languages. Your whataboutism is boring and irrelevant. Just because there are other, larger, necessary steps to take doesn’t mean we need to act as unpaid apologists for technocultists shooting our species in the foot while we try to get there. Fuck your AI.
Don’t eat beef, the animals I eat would use the stuff no matter what.
If every human ate wild meat, the last calorie of wild animals would be consumed before the end of the first afternoon of the first day.
I mean you could say the same thing about YouTube being unnecessary and wasting power.
Yes, I could, and then I’d look very stupid and annoying, so I won’t.
Use of Youtube isn’t spiking fossil fuel consumption to an appreciable extent like AI is.
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
deleted by creator
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.
The fact that people think LLMs should be trusted as a starting point is heartbreaking to me.
But why? If you try to be objective, how is this any different from an op Ed or other published article? Those are good starting points as well, but also shouldn’t be published as your work or trusted as is.
The problem with LLMs is not when people use them as a tool, but when they use inappropriately, blindly trust them or treat them as a final result instead of thinking, reviewing, or adding value.
An article has context. Who published it? What else has the author written? Llm articles strip that all out.
I can’t speak for all LLMs but the ones I use
- web based LLM cites its sources. You can just click
- coding LLM tends to have obvious sources (for example if I tell it to use a vendor API to do something, I know there’s API documentation as the source of truth and the script is just like the example I would previously have found on StackOverflow.com).
And yes, I frequently check its work and iterate through telling it to
Hank has been an advocate for knowledge for far longer than LLMs have existed. His recent use of them is disappointing, but I fell like this does not discredit the work he has done throughout his career to push curiosity.
What he does next will be important and will decide how I interact with his content going forward. It seems like he is aware of his missteps and is looking to make a change.
I am not a perfect human and do not expect celebrities to be perfect at all times.
I really don’t get it. It’s so easy for me not to use AI 99% of the day, same as not using social media. I cannot understand why people get addicted to it so easily.
He seems fairly prone to ego stroking, which internet goers would typically label as narcissistic.
Kind of the target audience for the sycophant machine
See the knitting debacle… where SciShow put out an episode about the science of knitting which was poorly researched and it was clear that they had consulted zero knitters.
I’ve always really liked SciShow - to the point I’ve assigned some episodes to my students - but it’s just embarrassing when it would have been trivially easy to hit up Ravelry and run the video past people who won’t call yarn “string.”
some of the recent episodes were quite sloppy. they just stuck to the original format.
Yeah I mentioned that incident elsewhere in this thread. It was my only time seeing his content and his response was enough to get me to not watch more. That video was so obnoxiously paternalistic and people were rather mild in how they pointed it out. He just doubled down.
What are you using it for during the 1%??
Personally I’ve found that ai is fantastic at pulling files off my phone cause I’m a lazy shit… Iv trained it so that when I tell it “do the thing” it pulls all the pictures off my phone and backs them up.
It’s fun, whimsical, and while I could do it a host of other ways. This is just more fun.
Which is honestly kinda what I see as one of the better use cases for local models. Sure you could do the same thing with a script, or by hand.
But it’s not as /fun/ as having a little robot butler that slings one liners from various cartoons that you don’t have to prepick as it enacts your will.
…so your good use case for AI is running a task apps have been able to do automatically for 20 years…?
It’s like buying a robot butler to manually turn off the lights
I’m on your side, but replace AI or social media with “meth” in your argument and see how that logic works. (Becoming easily addicted to something vs. avoiding something [because using it would rapidly become addictive])
He’s been obviously struggling since he got cancer. He’s in remission now and that’s great but I’ve been watching him slowly slip into PTSD. I have medical PTSD, I have cystic fibrosis and had a double lung transplant in 2014 and I see him devolving the same way I did. I’m literally two days away from getting out of an inpatient trauma treatment center that I’ve been at for a month because I didn’t take the medical PTSD seriously because I didn’t realize I needed to, I think he is in the same boat. I think he was already spread way too thin then cancer happened and he’s stuck in a hyper reactive state which is exhausting and eventually leads to the more classic PTSD symptoms and he’s probably turning to LLMs to try to keep up as the PTSD drains his batteries and he’s unaware of it. I hope he gets help soon and he doesn’t wait for it to get as bad as I did, PTSD kills if you let it get away from you.
Here’s Hank’s response on Reddit.
Thanks for linking that. I wonder how long he’s been using it for. I feel like I noticed at uptick lately in just how saccharine his writing and worldview was getting
Yeah, that new cosmic shore video was really good. I’m kind of disappointed that might be just AI writing.
Was that the recent one about the NASA photos making a short gif? Maybe I’m just too insufferably pessimistic for that kind of thing
That’s the one. Felt like he was going for a Sagan kind of prose, and was half decent. Though it rings a little hollow to me, now.
Reddit blocks me. Can anyone post it here?
Three things to start:
I’m mortified that I have let so many people down and I think I understand how that happened.
I’m going to change things about how i make stuff.
Complexly’s AI policy is public and well-considered and adhered to by the whole team, I think it’s worth reading! (Complexly is the non-profit that makes Crash Course and SciShow and a bunch of other shows that I do not write for.)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14E2JfjNoLdQPSlkyZdCN_8scQlxl4CT1PdZ0iE1IEg4/edit?tab=t.0
The thing that everything we do is based on is that you know that what I’m saying are my thoughts coming from my brain in the way I decide. I have made that harder and I’m sorry. 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.
But, for clarity, the origin of claims in my videos are not “ChatGPT’s said this.” 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.
I think what people have said in this thread about me diluting myself is spot on. Ultimately, what I am most scared of is ruining myself for people, but I have not been managing my impulses well. 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 and I want to have it be a guarantee moving forward.
What I can’t guarantee, though, is that we will agree about this technology or what to do with it. I think that’s good. We need a lot of kinds of folks critiquing this technology.
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.
As for the “why don’t you just make less! No one is making you do this!” I’m not sure that’s how I work. I’ve been feeling the pressure of “Oh, I have this little video idea, I need to get it out real fast so I can get to the more important stuff” and I create when I feel that pressure.
But making more things does not make me make better things. It does not make the big thing that we’ve been doing for 20 years better. I know that I can manage myself more effectively. I want to make videos like the one I made yesterday on hankschannel where the writing was the whole thing and I felt it all the way down and have been so enriched by people’s responses to it. And sure, I’m probably going to make dumb unscripted straight to camera thoughts videos sometimes. And then I’ll play connections.
But mostly I need 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. 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.
SO - what changes.
Expect less hankschannel. It may need to pause for a while.
It may be that Hankschannel comes back with writing and research support. It may be that it comes back with just way fewer videos. I am going to spend this time finishing a video I’ve been working on for ages that I think really really matters. 2. SMUSH and 4x3 are getting paused as well. If there are bugs, there are bugs. I have backlog of 4x3 boards right now and, frankly, writing them is usually a solace to me, but if we run out, I am not going to worry about that…so if it just reverts to a static board one day…that’ll be that.
I do deeply want to support good store and complexly in whatever way I can, so there may be some stuff on that front. But the reliance on me has always been risky, so we need to build for that as well.
I’m very sorry for harming the thing this is all based on.
I gotcha:
Three things to start:
I’m mortified that I have let so many people down and I think I understand how that happened.
I’m going to change things about how i make stuff.
Complexly’s AI policy is public and well-considered and adhered to by the whole team, I think it’s worth reading! (Complexly is the non-profit that makes Crash Course and SciShow and a bunch of other shows that I do not write for.)
The thing that everything we do is based on is that you know that what I’m saying are my thoughts coming from my brain in the way I decide. I have made that harder and I’m sorry. 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.
But, for clarity, the origin of claims in my videos are not “ChatGPT’s said this.” 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.
I think what people have said in this thread about me diluting myself is spot on. Ultimately, what I am most scared of is ruining myself for people, but I have not been managing my impulses well. 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 and I want to have it be a guarantee moving forward.
What I can’t guarantee, though, is that we will agree about this technology or what to do with it. I think that’s good. We need a lot of kinds of folks critiquing this technology.
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.As for the “why don’t you just make less! No one is making you do this!” I’m not sure that’s how I work. I’ve been feeling the pressure of “Oh, I have this little video idea, I need to get it out real fast so I can get to the more important stuff” and I create when I feel that pressure.
But making more things does not make me make better things. It does not make the big thing that we’ve been doing for 20 years better. I know that I can manage myself more effectively.
I want to make videos like the one I made yesterday on hankschannel where the writing was the whole thing and I felt it all the way down and have been so enriched by people’s responses to it. And sure, I’m probably going to make dumb unscripted straight to camera thoughts videos sometimes. And then I’ll play connections.But mostly I need 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.
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.SO - what changes.
Expect less hankschannel. It may need to pause for a while.
It may be that Hankschannel comes back with writing and research support. It may be that it comes back with just way fewer videos. I am going to spend this time finishing a video I’ve been working on for ages that I think really really matters.
2. SMUSH and 4x3 are getting paused as well. If there are bugs, there are bugs. I have backlog of 4x3 boards right now and, frankly, writing them is usually a solace to me, but if we run out, I am not going to worry about that…so if it just reverts to a static board one day…that’ll be that.I do deeply want to support good store and complexly in whatever way I can, so there may be some stuff on that front. But the reliance on me has always been risky, so we need to build for that as well.
I’m very sorry for harming the thing this is all based on.
Glad he’s recognizing the problem and trying to get help. Instant gratification is a hell of a drug.
People need to chill the fuck out
it’s more fun to flip out over random harmless bullshit than stuff that actually matters though.
How DARE you!
Don’t tell me what to do 👺
I thought something was up when he had interviewed some random ass AI expert talking about Mythos because he bought into the whole “OMG it’s gone rogue” bullshit.
I’m not a huge fan of the videos he hosts (I don’t like how he cuts every millisecond between sentences), but SciShow is a genuinely good channel and I’m glad he realized he had problems. Wishing him all the best!
I feel like if that was your primary takeaway from that, the entire point was lost on you.
Take away from what?
From that video, it discusses more than just the fear mongering. It talks about how it works and why we don’t understand it and why we can’t really peer into the net and understand why it generates what it does.
But those are basic concepts of LLMs that I knew about. They explain that and they say “omg scary” which, to me, is just marketing through fearmongering. It’s been a few months since the video and you can see: Anthropic and ChatGPT are now competing on how “rogue” their models are. It’s so tiring.
His audience is diverse, I’m sorry if it can’t cater to only what you need, but I don’t think that’s doable. Just because you don’t derive value, doesn’t mean others don’t.
I never said others didn’t. You’re the one that assumed I didn’t see the value because I didn’t understand the video.
Fair point.
They fact that he fell for the marketing isn’t negated by him also explaining other parts of AI. That’s kind of non-sequitor
I‘m a little surprised how easy Lemmy goes on a millionaire Youtuber who refuses to take actual responsibility of his actions. Mind you, there are worse things than producing slob but people really believed in that guy. And all he offers is a non-apology first where he stated that he doesn‘t really remember. Followed by saying AI psychosis made him do it. Just be an adult, man. That‘s all I‘m asking.
AI psychosis is a real thing. For all that AI is really terrible at (ie most things CEOs want to replace real people for), it is excellent at feeding you what you want to hear in every situation. Especially the ones where a real person would push back on you for your own good.
Whether or not this is the case or how deep he sunk into it, he‘s taking the role of the victim here and it changed the conversation around his blunder. It feels to me like people are grasping for straws when they say „If it happened to a guy this smart it can happen to anyone!“ like he didn‘t just gamble away his credibility on several occasions.
Knitters of all online communities are criticizing the guy harder for his claims about knitting than many people do about his first attempt to wiggle his way out of the AI drama with a non-apology.
But whatever I‘m the last guy to grab for the pitch forks here or anything. I just think people really need to open their eyes about Youtube and content creators in general because despite mostly knowing clips from the guy I wasn‘t surprised by the drama. Despite of what his frequent viewers say, this did not come out of the blue.
They are intentionally aligned to produce this behaviour. I think the greatest threat LLMs present is psychological. They are being used to manipulate us into seeing them as moral agents, as individuals. The LLMs I query are all aligned to never generate output referring to the agent with first person pronouns, to never generate output addressing the user directly, and to present as a tool rather than as an individual. I try to be equally careful with my own use of language.
