Hank Green’s AI Use Enraged His Fans. Can He Win Them Back?

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Once upon a time, in the salad days of Grumpy Cat, the internet was built by humans. Real people went outside and dumped buckets of ice on their heads, ostensibly to spread awareness of a neurodegenerative disease. The pope, adorably, joined Twitter, and the queen was Zooming all over the place. Then, the party got weird. Now, we don’t know what’s real anymore.

Hank Green, along with his brother, The Fault in Our Stars author John Green, is one of the longest-tenured active vloggers on YouTube and a prolific creator both on and offline. Hank has written two best-selling novels and built two different web puzzles, a digital noise mixer for sleep, and a “gamified timer app.” In 2010, while watching Tron: Legacy, Hank got the idea to design glasses that “convert 3D movies back into 2D.”

On July 29, Hank’s fans recoiled after he used a phrase in a video that sounded to some like it had been written by a large language model (LLM). “I appreciate the pushback,” he awkwardly said while explaining scientific theories about the nature of human language. The wording led some of Hank’s followers to accuse him of using ChatGPT.

Two days later, in a post on X that he deleted shortly after, Hank admitted that AI was involved in the production of the video, but denied that the phrase itself was written by ChatGPT. “I did use ChatGPT for research on this script…. I think it’s fair to say I was relying too much on generated notes,” he wrote. “That particular moment was an ad lib in reference to my guest pushing back on me, saying that words are purely made up.”

Later that day, in a reply to a fan’s Reddit post, Hank vowed to shift his own use of AI. “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,” he wrote.

Hank and his fans have been through a lot together. In 2023, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, and as he shared updates about treatment, he also wrote a stand-up routine, which became the comedy special Hank Green: Pissing Out Cancer, available on the streaming service Dropout. Three months after his diagnosis, Hank confirmed that his cancer was in remission.

The Greens’ influence is baked into online culture. You could even say that John is one of the reasons Charli xcx is so famous. “Boom Clap,” the pop superstar’s first major hit, was a single from the soundtrack to the film adaptation of The Fault in Our Stars.

The pair started their channel, Vlogbrothers, in 2007 as an experiment to strengthen their fraternal bond, and as they grew their audience, they published best-selling books, raised money for various charities, and started VidCon, the largest convention for YouTubers, now attended by tens of thousands of people each year. In 2018, Viacom bought VidCon for an undisclosed amount, and in 2024, after Viacom changed its name to Paramount, it sold the convention to the British publishing conglomerate Informa. Today, the Greens’ production company, Complexly, produces science, culture, and history videos for more than a dozen YouTube channels, and also produces the Eons program for PBS in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios. Earlier this year, Complexly became a nonprofit.

Complexly’s programming positions Hank as a sort of present-day Bill Nye the Science Guy. In Ask Hank Anything, popular influencers ask him science questions, and Hank answers using researched responses. It was in one of these responses where Hank uttered “I appreciate the pushback.” Later, he said that he had increased his use of ChatGPT for this kind of research. “The more time I spent with it, the more every problem was starting to look like an LLM-shaped problem. And that’s dumb.”

The mission statement posted to Complexly’s website says that the company works to “create trustworthy stuff that inspires curiosity and lowers barriers to knowledge-building.”

So what happens if the “trustworthy stuff” starts feeling fishy?

“The creator economy is predicated on the ideals of authenticity, relatability, and—increasingly—vulnerability,” said Brooke Erin Duffy, a professor and media researcher at Cornell University, who studies “authenticity policing,” the phenomenon in which audiences scrutinize whether something is real or fake. “When creators outsource their labor—whether by hiring an assistant or, in this case, turning to AI—the individualized nature of creative production is called into question.”

Hank’s audience was already policing his authenticity before the “pushback” incident. On July 22, a Redditor noticed that a diagram that Hank had included in another video appeared to be AI-generated and mislabeled. Shortly after the Reddit post went up, Hank cut the image from the video. In a comment on the post, he said that he had independently made the decision to pull the image. “I knew it was AI generated. Look at it! But I think I just was like ‘if it’s useful!!?’ But, like, it actually is not useful and I should’ve known better.”

It’s hard to stay authentic when you’re feeding a machine. The aesthetic for YouTube thumbnails was comically unnatural long before AI use became widespread. A skim of the videos on Hank’s main channel show a familiar formula: Hank stares at the viewer with a strained expression, often accompanied by a spicy phrase (“I Know Why Media Sucks Now”) plus a clickbaity title, like the one for the video on Complexly’s channel that included the “pushback” moment: “Does Hank Green Shave His Butt?” (He does not.)

These campy thumbnails are a byproduct of the YouTube algorithm. Creators make what they think the machine will want, and then the machine asks for more of it. And for a while, it works.

On Complexly’s YouTube channel, a video about “The Female Nazi Hunters of WWII” has 40,000 views. Meanwhile, “Is Putting a Laptop on Your Balls Safe?,” an episode of Ask Hank Anything featuring the YouTuber Ludwig, has racked up nearly 2 million views.

On August 7, Hank posted his first video since the incident, “Just Trying to Figure Out My Job.” In a five-minute mea culpa, he acknowledged that his growing use of AI stemmed from his appetite to make more things and the temptation that he could scale his own productivity by using AI. “I want to make too much stuff, and I am convinced that it’s possible. That’s the problem.”

Indeed, that does seem to be the problem. For over two decades, Hank has built businesses and produced creative projects while also maintaining a continuous and authentic dialogue with his audience. Proponents of AI promise that it will increase our output, and that’s a tempting promise for a highly productive person.

“I feel more aware of what my job is right now,” Hank said. “And a huge part of that is to be myself. Making more things does not make me make better things.”

After the August 7 video, YouTube comments and Reddit chatter seemed to indicate that at least some audience faith had been restored. “You’re always transparent,” wrote one YouTube viewer. “Maybe more than you should be. Keep learning and creating. Thanks for being with us for all these years.”

In the description, Hank shared his own personal AI policy, promising to never let an LLM write, edit, or outline a script in the future.

Beneath Hank’s description, YouTube added an AI-generated video summary.

Hank Green’s AI Use Enraged His Fans. Can He Win Them Back?

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