I dont know nearly enough about the Hank Green situation, considering i found out about it maybe 7 minutes ago, but it's bringing to mind thoughts already:
Firstly, on Hank Green: he's been producing so much content lately, and ive liked less and less of it, so i stopped engaging with hankschannel. Im not surprised *in retrospect* to find out that the mediocre overproduction was the result of him, by his own admission, relying on AI.
But also: I have been comparing myself to Hank Green recently amidst everyone talking about how productive he is. Ive had a lot of negative self-talk, like: "Hank Green is chronically ill just like you, but look at how much he gets done in a day."
Another person ive negatively compared myself to is a friend who began learning japanese at the same time as me, but, unlike me, they post paragraphs of japanese on social media all the time. I thought their writing skills were much better than mine, that they were a faster thinker and so could churn out japanese prose, and it made me feel embarrassed, because writing a page in japanese takes a lot of mental effort for me. While I've written about 70 pages of japanese in the last 3 months, including many drafts i revised multiple times, i still felt like i was hopelessly stupid compared to my friend.
You see where this is going: They told me recently it's all AI-written. They seemed shocked at the idea of writing 70 pages in japanese on your own.
So that's two times now where I thought I was comparing myself to other people who seemed inexplicably faster and more productive than i could ever be.
Im especially haunted by the latter because i thought i was doing everything right: i stopped posting studyblr content and just locked in and worked really hard, writing words that are between me and my japanese teacher. But nevertheless, instead of feeling accomplished, i felt *ashamed.* My hard work felt like failure because I was comparing it to someone else's AI usage.
I have a feeling that we are going to lose any sense of what a person can do on their own.
And then my question is: Who is this all for? Hank Green's productivity wasnt for me as a long-time viewer—I didnt have the time to engage with all that. And what's the point of merely appearing to know how to write without working on those skills for real? What is all this performance for?
I just think we're pretty culturally fucked right now. I dont see a way out of it.
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