Hank Green did nothing wrong

Hank Green's one of my favorite YouTubers. Well, he's in some hot water right now because he got caught using AI. Hank does a show called Ask Hank Anything. In one of those segments, he said the words, I appreciate the pushback. That's it. That was what started this whole thing. And people said, I appreciate the pushback is something AI says. Are you using AI to write your scripts? Hank went to X and basically said, I produce under a ton of pressure. I did use ChatGPT for research on the script. He then deleted this X post and then went to Reddit and wrote a much Longer essay, but basically what he said was: "I don't use AI to write my scripts, but I do use AI to find research papers. I still read the research papers myself, but AI helps me find and uncover research papers that I might have otherwise missed." However, in this same post, he does go on to say: "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, and I mean this whole thing has just created a ton of controversy around the internet. People essentially just trying to cancel Hank Green for this. But here's my take on the whole thing: I actually do understand where people are coming from on this. Believe it or not, people come to his channel because they're expecting Hank's opinions, Hank's commentary. And if all of a sudden one day you have to question whether what you're hearing actually came from Hank's mind or came as a result of like an AI response, now you're not sure if. These are Hank's real thoughts. Saying all that, Hank's response was, look, I use this for research. It saves me a lot of time on research. The people that are getting mad that he's using this for research, it makes no sense to me because he's like, in his words, using these AI models almost as like a glorified better search engine. So I don't think Hank did anything wrong, but I think the bigger story is that this is bringing into the public consciousness creators are using AI to assist them in what they're doing online. And some people are finding, I don't really like that. I think the thing that bugs me the most is probably the amount of judgment that other people put on creators, because creators are like real people too. They have lives, they have families, they often have careers and other commitments outside of what you're just seeing on video. And they're also looking for ways to sort of optimize and improve their workflows. And every creator has a sort of line that they're willing to cross as far as how much they're willing to automate without without sort of giving up the amount of them that still goes into the process. And it's something that I personally struggle with all the time, and I don't think a lot of people give other creators enough grace for trying to figure out new ways to optimize and sort of streamline their processes, because everybody's looking to do that.