He says his loved ones don't think his LLM use has been "healthy."
  • slacktoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3 hours

    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.

    I think this is very honest and we shouldn’t give someone shit for speaking up.

    • GreenBeard@lemmy.caEnglish
      2 hours

      This. AI and more generally algorithm dependence is an addiction and watching him struggle with it the past few years has been heartbreaking. Watching him try to bargain and rationalize an objectively misanthropic technology that grew out of a sphere that he was a major role in and did begin as an objectively beautiful attempt at building community and healthy dialogue is very disappointing. I don’t hate or judge him. He tried to do something beautiful. He just didn’t understand the Faustian bargain he made in the process. The systemic forces turning his work into poison.

      I don’t judge him for wrestling with it. I’m sad for him. I’m sad for a lot of us. We’re all working in a system that’s slowly killing us to some degree or another. There is no ethically clean life in a system predicated on greed, gluttony and lies. His optimism may have slipped into delusional, but it beats the crushing cynicism that comes with naked realism.

      I don’t think that we should lose hope, but the future can’t look like this. His Icarus moment shouldn’t be the end of his journey. I hope he finds himself and begins planting new seeds even if none of us ever live to see the shade of the trees that grow from them.

  • cattywampas@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3 hours

    There are few people I trust more than Hank Green when it comes to something like AI.

      • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        2 hours

        His quote from the article:

        “[…] 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.

        I was talking about this with [my wife] Katherine last night and she did not pull any punches. Frankly, neither did [my brother] John. Neither of them think I’ve been being healthy. I need to readjust.”

        Not really knowing the drama before today, it seems like he is being very rational and speaking honestly about the effects LLMs are having on his behavior and that he identified he needs to change, which is what the whole article is about.

        • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
          2 hours

          The article (Hank Green understanding himself) and the comment I was responding to (Hank Green misleading people about AI) are two similar different topics that can and should be judged separately.

          I was responding to the person who said he was generally trustworthy about the topic in general, with what I think is a significant counterexample.

          • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            1 hour

            I guess it’s up to the reader to determine if the linked article from a few days ago of Hank reflecting bullish attitude should be judged separately from the articles and videos months ago about his behavior he has since identified as problematic. Maybe he used to be a piece of shit, not anymore? People can change.

            • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
              1 hour

              I don’t associate these two different events as evidence of a shift in personal stances, because they can both be things he believes at the same time. That also means that hopefully people can empathize with him even while disagreeing with his stances about some things.

              (If his stance did change, that would be great and I wouldn’t want to deny it, but his video promoting AI lobbyists is still unfortunately up.)

      • MountingSuspicion@reddthat.comEnglish
        2 hours

        I don’t generally click on random YouTube videos unless more information is provided, but I give this one a gamble. It was pretty well done and I appreciate the creators overall point and evidence. For anyone else in the comments, I think there are two couple of second long clips of Hank Green that are used to make a larger point about what are essentially attempts at normalizing AI.

      • queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        2 hours

        Ok, I watched up until he started comparing the development of “AI”, as he calls it, to the development of nuclear fission technology, and that’s where I got fed up. Is generative AI as “impactful” as a nuclear weapon detonation over a city? This guy says no, but I don’t know how you can possibly compare the two. LLMs are great at manipulating information, they aren’t high-energy explosives. There’s no common definition of “impactful” that meaningfully puts the two technologies on the same scale of comparison. They’re just different.

        And why does it matter, anyway? Is “nuclear weapons” the bar for when we should start caring about impactful technologies? I think not. Generative AI is an informational monster born of the internet and it is unique to it, and that is a huge problem given that the internet is quickly becoming the defacto medium of communication for groups over a certain size. We should be taking it seriously, full stop. I’m less interested in ranking it alongside other catastrophic technologies.

        I think we haven’t seen the full potential of generative AI yet, and I fear it may be quite destructive (more destructive) if we can’t engineer our way around the dead internet that it was created to usher in. I think we should be trying to learn about it, how it works, how it may evolve, and how to have a usable internet alongside it.