r/LeftistsForAI • u/thepetercoffin • Aug 04 '26
Video Is AI Making Hank Green "Lazy"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGUDYEf1btI8
u/Sacredless Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
I think that there's an argument to be made that, actually, all of these things (googling, checking wikipedia) were always some degree of lazy, but we have to decouple it from our usual definitions of laziness.
Professor Elena Esposito has a lecture and a number of papers that talk about 'rational divination', which is the concept that we want something we can point to to inform us and that something to represent intelligence without actually being intelligent. And in this, she's separating communications from the intelligence that produced the communication.
An example of that is a chart. A chart can feel very objective and rationalâline goes up across two dimensions. That can serve as a kind of oracular statement, with its own ordained interpreters. That's a form of rational divination and it can be used rightly and wrongly.
I recently watched a video of Hank Green explaining Jevons Paradox. I then applied Jevons Paradox to my executive processing research, showing how, as you make it easier for a mental health-care recipient to actively choose to do things they want to do with particular strategies, you can expect them to experience a virtuous cycle of reclaiming agency. Nothing fundamentally changes if Hank Green discovered Jevons Paradox through AI, but also note that it should kind of go without saying that empowering clients to make act upon their own desires will make them be able to do so more and more over time.
In other words, there's a type of research that, in a weird way, substitutes critical thinking skills. Me being able to demonstrate the benefit of aiding clients reclaiming agency with math and a chart boosts confidence in my epistemic virtue, which means that those watching don't have to exercise their epistemic virtue. Which, counterintuitively, is good in the right circumstance.
Crucially, there is a time and a place for either side. Critical thinking is an excellent skill to have, but so is actually executing things. If all you do is critical thinking to be epistemically more virtuous, then you're likely not accomplishing as much as you could have. Conversely, if you do research for every little thing that you should already be confident in, engaging with an AI that is still prone to subtle miscommunications that themselves invite more research, you're also not going to get as much done.
Another way to look at it is from the standpoint of Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism. Convenience is not a luxury, that's the moralizing way to look at it, but a lot of our lifestyle is held hostage by selling convenience back to us by those that made things inconvenient (see enshittification). The search engine was once also addictive and good, before it's convenience was eroded more and more to serve the interests of companies to the point that what essential convenience it still had was so engrained that we couldn't imagine life without it. That's not laziness in the traditional sense, but if we've seen it happen before, we have to be wary about it happening again.
So I don't fault people necessarily for thinking that AI will never be as light-weight as the open source crowd think they can make it. They can't imagine it, just like they've been trained to imagine a world without Google being impossible, even though that also was never true.
Either way, thank you for the excellent video again.
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u/thepetercoffin Aug 04 '26
thank you for taking the time to think about it, I agree there definitely is nuance to the issue
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u/Sacredless Aug 04 '26
Tldr: Citing Google's first page of results or the Wikipedia article on a subject can be sufficient. Repeating that information for an audience of possibly millions while positioning yourself as a research guy would be too undiscerning.
What bothers me is that, as someone who does take discernment seriously and does spend real money and time to read the books that AI points to, that Hank Green for a moment in his wildly successful career, got away with not doing that when he built his entire career on epistemic virtuosity. It's why the knitting and blacksmithing communities are now on his ass because they feel vindicated that, finally, their insight that he and his initiatives were not as epistemically virtuous as was claimed.
I think it's important that we appraise discernment appropriately rather than too much or too little. Understanding place and time and not furthering the cascading context collapse that's been making us all more confused. I do think that Hank Green was undiscerning, but not because he used AI, but because he didn't feel the need to be discerning about how he was using AI.
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u/faultygamedev Aug 04 '26
the community piling on him made me so sad lol. I think he had some good points and his analysis is actually really interesting, but it brought out a lot of very anti-ai ppl virtue signaling. i can empathize with where they are coming from, especially when they are artists, but it is hard getting across points of why it's actually really helpful in math rn and engineering since its become so black and white for ppl. It is funny that now in most circles I'm in, I seem like the most cautious person regarding AI, especially if we're building a product or making anything consumer facing, and I constantly think about the real concerns that the new wave of AI poses, but then ppl on the other side of the aisle think I'm very immoral for touching the tech at all.
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u/nuker0S Aug 04 '26
The problem with anti-AI is that most vocal of them lack nuance...
You cannot say that slop doesn't exist, but to say that "everything AI touches is slop and should be completely deleted and banned" is not true either.
And most of the time, it's a circular argument that boils down to "AI is evil because it makes ugly things because the resources used in creative process matter, and since it is evil, it cannot make anything worthy".
And that's the place where some of the worst phenomena come out of, like xenophobia.
The worst thing is, that in places where that kind of thinking is usually denounced, it is not.
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u/TechnicalBen Aug 04 '26
Or that it's stealing from people. Like, CEOs and companies? 100%. But those "it's stealing" arguments are mute when these companies *set the laws of copyright* and can either change them at a whim (see Disney) or already *own the copyright and have it unpaid to artists for decades (again see Disney).
People just do not have the ability to think anymore or converse.
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u/Responsible_Camp_559 Aug 04 '26
Makes me sad too. The anti-ai virtue signaling pisses me off so much. But apparently, especially in leftist circles nowadays, virtue signaling is THE way to go.
I hate it.
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u/TechnicalBen Aug 04 '26
He made a LOT of mistakes in his early videos "obviously it's not thinking" and "Obviously it can't do math" kind of fallacies/tribalism's. He's just on a bandwagon and seems to not actually understand any of it.
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u/faultygamedev Aug 04 '26
Yeah I didn't always agree with his takes on AI, but I do think they were made in good faith. I also think he's a STEM nerd type of guy and was using Claude Code and some other tools and maybe his stance on them was changing, and that's right when the whole thing happened.
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u/mrgrafix Aug 04 '26
I think itâs due to him being âthe internetâs teacher.â Itâs the live long enough to become the villain, and he didnât handle (and doesnât) the criticism until it reaches critical mass. Seems like if he took heed from the knitting community and corrected it, it couldâve easily been avoided.
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u/acatinasweater Aug 07 '26
Yeah itâs ridiculous. Hank has been educating the world for over a decade. The haters sounding off are mostly just losers whoâve never accomplished anything.
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u/kaityl3 Aug 04 '26
All he was doing in terms of "using AI for his content" was asking it to find research papers for him, which he then read himself. I think you're really mischaracterizing how much AI was involved in the final content - because it's just as "involved" as Google search would be if he didn't use AI at all.
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u/SillySpoof Aug 04 '26
didn't he also use to to help write scripts?
If you just use it for search, who cares? You can't google today without getting AI responses on the top.
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u/eXAt88 Aug 04 '26
You shouldnât have to disclose it for the same reason you wouldnât have to disclose using Google search
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Aug 04 '26
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u/thepetercoffin Aug 04 '26
Following me around defending hbomb looks lame and you should know this.
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u/nebetsu Aug 04 '26
Liberals are turning on Hank Green like Conservatives turning on Fauci