Opportunity in the Hank Green Backlash

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Happy Monday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is an internal version of OpenAI’s Astra model solving 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science.

Today’s Lineup

Tech blogger John Gruber at 12:00 PM
Sequoia Capital Partner Shaun Maguire at 12:40 PM
Valar Atomics Co-Founder & CEO Isaiah Taylor at 12:40 PM
Base Power Co-Founder & COO Justin Lopas at 1:00 PM
Satyress Founder Beau Gaston at 1:10 PM
Intology Co-Founder Ron Arel at 1:20 PM

Run of Show

Opportunity in the Hank Green Backlash

Hank Green is getting pilloried on social media over “using ChatGPT for research.” It’s a silly situation, made even more ridiculous by the fact that OpenAI’s new Astra model is making yet another huge jump forward in solving long-standing open math problems. AI is science, and positioning as an “AI-free science creator” is going to be very rough going forward. But first, let’s give some history of what’s going on.

Hank Green is an OG YouTuber, he joined in 2007, just two years after the platform launched. He put up big views and built a massive audience online, but also created a real media company around his work across Vlogbrothers, Crash Course, and VidCon (probably the premiere YouTube conference). Over 20 years he’s become one of the most trusted educational creators on the platform.

So last Wednesday, he published an episode of “Ask Hank Anything,” a show where he has guests interview him and ask him all sorts of questions, many that he has to go and research in post to answer fully. The day after the episode went up, the X user Manager_JoJo posted a clip of him from the episode and accused him of using ChatGPT to write the script. The key line is Hank saying “I appreciate the pushback” - which isn’t a top AI phrase in my mind, but I guess people really latched on to this one. I guess it seemed a little out of place because he’s just talking to the camera at that point (since the clip is a cutaway from the interview) but he is in fact referring to the pushback the guest was giving him during the in-person segment.

Headlines proliferated to the tune of “Hank Green accidentally reads AI prompt feedback left in his script.” Hank has to deny this, but then goes on to admit that he does use ChatGPT for research. This did not land well. Clearly it’s just a small subset of his audience that takes the time to flame online about AI usage, but the end result is dozens (maybe hundreds) of posts about how AI cannot be used for research because it hallucinates or removes some key human element from the process of learning. Very odd to anyone who has used modern models. There’s a lot that AI can’t do well yet, but pulling a bunch of links and quotes together from across the internet is definitely reliable now.

Hank did clarify that the script wasn’t written by AI, but he did state that he hasn’t been happy with how he’s been using AI and may wind up publishing less as a result. This doesn’t seem like total audience capture, but there is an interesting opportunity here. AI is clearly a wedge issue. Billions of people use AI and get value from it, at the same time it’s deeply unpopular and lots of people like to post angrily online about how AI is bad for a variety of reasons. But education and science in particular are going to be intertwined with AI for the foreseeable future and not being able to talk clearly about that interaction is going to be a serious disadvantage. Any science creator who figures out how to delicately balance the benefits of AI in science and education with the pushback that will inevitably come from plenty of online commenters will be very well-positioned to build a media brand and in the process, actually deliver accurate information. — John

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