A Meditation on Hank Green
I was first introduced to Hank Green via The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, an utterly delightful artifact of the pre-terrible Internet that I absolutely fell in love with at the time. (I have a bit of a fondness for Pride and Prejudice for reasons that should be obvious if you think about it).
At the time I was definitely not into vloggers or, in general, people talking directly to camera who made up for not being very good at talking to camera with tonnes of quick edits. That changed, tho, as we entered The Quarantine Years and I got a bit more desperate for human connection, however artificial.
(And, of course, as anyone would after doing it every week for almost 20 years, he's a lot better at talking to camera these days).
So I've watched a lot of vlogbrothers. And hankschannel. And I've watched Crash Course and Sci Show and Ask Hank Anything and I've listened to Humans and Dear Hank & John. I'm now playing 4 × 3 and SMUSH daily along with Wordle and Connections (and a few others).
I was entirely aware that Hank was using LLMs to program those games. I'm sure he said as much. And, I mean, I love making things with code. Part of what I see as the promise of LLMs is they make programming—that is, making the computer do things for you—accessible to non-programmers. That's kind of great. Much as I worry about de-skilling and the de-valuing of my profession, I've tried to teach people how to program. I'm not a great teacher, but programming is an incredibly difficult skill to teach. I think everybody should be able to make their computers do the things they want them to do. My frustration with the computer industry in the last decade or two is that that seems to have no value to people selling—or maybe even buying—computers. And maybe normal people realizing that they can actually write software (or, okay, have software written for them by a machine), will convince them that being able to write software for your own computer ought to be a right, not a privilege granted to them by the gods of Apple or Microsoft.
But I digress.
Anyway, people got mad at Hank because he was using LLMs. Actually the thing that tipped them off, I guess, was an LLM-generated infographic. Which, yeah, wasn't great. And I guess he actually said, out loud, "I appreciate the pushback" in an AHA episode entitled "Does Hank Green Shave His Butt". This is something popular LLMs will say to you if you start arguing with them. (Don't argue with an LLM. There's no point. You're just training it to give you wrong answers).
I'm quite inclined to give Hank grace. I don't want to watch videos generated by LLMs. I don't think Hank's videos are generated by LLMs. But, like he says, he got sucked into LLMs, which I think is a real danger for people.
Hank is a deeply fascinating person, which, I think, is why I keep being attracted to the stuff he makes. But he's not a faultless superhuman or anything. He also doesn't need me defending him or anything. He'll be okay.
And he's been on the Internet for a long time. He knows how this goes. He spent time away from the Internet. He's back a bit now, following his own rules. Right after the whole thing went down I happened to listen to this January episode of Dear Hank and John talking about that time 12 years ago John Green made people on Tumblr angry at him. Here, Hank gives John the advice he's following now. And also talks about his own struggles with this sort of Internet nonsense. And, in other episodes of that podcast, he frequently talks about his struggles with needing to do so much, and his brother chides him for doing too much. And LLMs. But in a kind, supportive way.
I think if you want to take anything from this, it's maybe the value of having a support network to navigate life's turmoils. He'll be okay.