This Hank Green situation is kind of sad. Aside from the outdated beliefs about AI, it's clear that most of the aggrieved population have never done research. Like research research.
Everyone seems to think you can just... Google stuff? And it comes up? bruh the moment you get anywhere near the frontier of knowledge, accessibility craters. Hard.
A real life example: during my PhD, my whole (subsubsub-)field existed basically entirely because a certain sensible conjecture turns out to be false, so we need a weird subtle painful approach rather than just using the obviously true fact.
How do we know it's not true? A counterexample was given in 1913 in a paper written in french, which no one actually cites, has no existing english translation, is nigh impossible to find a pdf of (no one could tell me its name - only its author's name), and is over 100 pages long, seems to be (I think) concerned largely with only tangentially related stuff, and is impenetrably dense due to lacking many modern concepts and notations. No one I'd ever met had ever read it, let alone understood it. And no other published proof exists - that I know of. It is not a simple proof. I wouldn't be able to prove it myself.
One day, my supervisor and I were emailing a colleague, and I offhandedly mentioned that it was the "only known counterexample". The colleague responded - oh! That's not true. Here's a handful more.
He did not supply any proofs. My supervisor went and figured out and wrote down a proof for one, and satisfied himself. He did not publish it, and it is basically illegible. He tried to explain it to me, but it was unintelligible. I could not make heads or tails of it. I still don't know, myself, for absolute certain, that a counter-example even exists. I had all the access in the world to journals and leading researchers in the area and I still couldn't get access to a remotely legible explanation of the foundational fact that spawned my field.
Research is THICK with folklore, and often the only way to learn something vital is to be wrong in the right way in front of the right person at the right time.
Y'know what tool is capable of cutting through a huge proportion of that reliance on luck and the hundreds of hours that go into just trying to figure out what's known and where to find it (even for established researchers familiar with their field)? yuh. LLMs. and nowadays they're basically reliable. They check online. They check themselves. And they've read the entire literature and picked up on much of the unwritten folklore whose presence in the literature is only the shadow it casts.
You'd have to be insane not to be using them at this point. Even just to ask "is it known whether or not blah?". Genuinely an invaluable tool. You don't have to offload your cognitive. You don't have to sell your soul or publish slop. You can just... benefit. And people are coming thick and fast at Hank Green - who has contributed so, so much to humanity - for using LLMs. For research. For his videos.
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