Hank Green on ChatGPT
All opinions in this article (and on this website) are purely my own without any LLM influence, and do not necessarily represent the views/opinions of my employer.
Hank Green admitted that he's been using ChatGPT for research. The entire internet has either jumped down his throat or is up in arms to defend him. I think both positions are too extreme, and this needs some nuance.
Basically, my entire take boils down to one sentence from his reddit post: "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."
I understand this very personally, as my job is pushing all of us HARD to use AI as much as possible at work with very few supports for how to use it safely and productively besides safeguards around company data. I too get significant dopamine from being able to create an Infrastructure-as-code plan and sitting back to watch an LLM implement it for me and automatically find and solve the bugs. Even at home, I use Claude for some tasks. This entire website is a Claude vibe-coded creation. I don't really know how to CSS. All of the content is 100% me without even a run through a spell checker, so take any issues with that up in the comments (that don't exist, as Claude decided not to vibe-code them in).
I don't have a problem with using generative AI for a lot of boring/repetitive tasks. I completely understand why Hank Green used it to help with sourcing and research - if I were him, I would probably be using it for that too.
Mostly, I want to say that AI has huge planet-scale ramifications, and the "right" answer to this exists somewhere in the grey area. But the right answer is not jumping down someone's throat when they realize they have a problem and admit it.