Hank Green has become a living testament to the theory that using AI too much melts content creators’ brains, even if they don’t generate their actual content with it. Internet drama over this issue is heated and still ongoing, even though Green—who is the brother of YA author John Green and an early YouTube star turned science explainer guy—has already apologized. More than that, he has provided a lengthy account of what he perceives the problem to be. He might differ with my summary “using AI too much melts content creators’ brains,” so here’s part of his version: “[…] 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. It is careless, and has disconnected me from where people are on this. I was talking about this with [my wife] Katherine last night and she did not pull any punches. Frankly, neither did [my brother] John. Neither of them think I’ve been being healthy. I need to readjust.” The apparent issue came to light when Green answered a pointed question during one of his videos, and his answer included the line “A better way to say it, and I appreciate the pushback, is a word is a human invention, and human inventions are made by bodies and brains working together.” LLMs say things like “I appreciate the pushback” all the time when they hallucinate or otherwise output something weird or wrong and the user corrects it. In a now deleted tweet, Green denied that he was reading something generated by an LLM, but acknowledged that he uses LLM notes, and that the video has an “AI feel.” In his lengthy apology and explanation on Reddit, he describes using LLMs, specifically ChatGPT, as something of a crutch. He describes it as useful for quickly accessing scholarly papers, and—more troublingly—for giving himself frequent hits of “dopamine,” a habit that other people in his life have noticed.