Hank Green says his AI chatbot use is not healthy

Hank Green, a novelist, comedian, and YouTuber with 3.2 million subscribers, apologized to his audience over his growing reliance on AI chatbots. The controversy started when, in a video on his educational channel Complexly, Green incongruously used a phrase that sounded like a chatbot’s response rather than his own words, leading viewers to conclude he’d written the script with a chatbot and accidentally left in its reply to one of his prompts.

In a since-deleted post on X, Green acknowledged he had produced the video under significant pressure and had used ChatGPT for research on the script, while maintaining that the phrase viewers flagged was actually his own response to the episode’s guest. He followed with a longer apology on Reddit, saying he felt he had let many people down and that he plans to reduce his video output as a result.

Green said he has used ChatGPT only to locate papers and other resources for learning about topics, and that the words and opinions in his videos remain his own, though he acknowledged it was fair to criticize him for diluting himself. He said he is not opposed to AI outright, but raised concerns about the technology’s impact on climate change and about the speed at which AI companies are trying to consolidate economic power.

Green will pause or post less frequently across his YouTube channels while he works out how to keep his own process clear, and favors more videos like a recent meditative one built entirely around the writing itself, alongside more unscripted, straight-to-camera content. “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,” he said. “It is careless, and has disconnected me from where people are on this.”

Why it matters

Green’s apology adds a prominent voice to a broader creator-economy debate over how much AI assistance is disclosed or acceptable in content people believe is human-made, at a time when he says AI companies are also consolidating economic power.