#vlogbrothers

probably not the best time to post an old Hank Green quote but here we are because I AM in fact wasting tons of glucose thinking of someone :(

I’d go so far as to say that without social media — or, rather, the need to compulsively post on social media, to be digitally productive — there’d be almost no reason for generative AI to exist at all. Whether it’s because of all the social media content these tools were trained on or because they were built by many of the same companies that created social platforms, chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude really want you to make stuff. And the unspoken anxiety driving the feeling that you must always be making stuff is a fear that you are simply not doing enough. And if you dig deep into why so many people feel that way, you will find the answer is social media every time. You must always be posting. To stay in people’s minds, to stay in good standing with the platforms, to take another whack at the slot machine that is the attention economy. I watch Green’s videos and I’ve definitely noticed the same mania I, myself, have felt so many times begin to crop up. A new project, a new initiative, a new video, a new post, a new company, new, new, more, more. A human collaborator would tell you to slow down — Green admits his brother, author John Green, was worried about him — but an AI has no incentive to do the same. It will mindlessly keep pushing you to keep engaging with it as every human around you thinks you’re losing your mind.