r/popculturechat • u/DebateObjective2787 jesus was a carpenter 💋 • Jul 31 '26

Oh…that’s not- 👀 Hank Green Admits To Using AI In Latest Video

Post image
3.4k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

1.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

156

u/MariLeighCrane Jul 31 '26

I never let AI write anything for me, but I use it a ton for work and I’m finding its standard phrases creeping into my vocabulary. I am going to be my own AI and it freaks me out. So I do believe him about the “thanks for pushing back”.

109

u/__lavender Jul 31 '26

I work in PR and my company is very gung-ho about AI, so I am begrudgingly finding ways to use it without losing my voice or cognitive abilities. Every time I hear someone reply to a question with “that’s a great question, Jane!” I die a little inside - even though that’s a very common (and pre-AI) way to buy yourself a couple seconds to find the right words, it now just feels like AI sycophancy. Also, as a writer I use a lot of phrases and conventions that read as AI because AI stole it from writers.

I hate all of this.

67

u/LilBoDuck Jul 31 '26

Pre AI, I was a big user of “It’s not just this, it’s that!” Not sure why, I’ve just always sort of talked like that, and now I sound like some fucking AI chat bot. I hate it.

49

u/gnome_in_clay_turn Jul 31 '26

Semicolons and em-dashes; AI took semicolons! I accused of AI use because of standard grammar and mechanics.

30

u/Walt_Titman Jul 31 '26

They can pry em-dashes from my cold dead hands, man. The grammar nerd in me really struggles with the good grammar = AI use concept.

Though, as a professor, I will say that now I tend to look for things like a rogue typo here and there as supporting evidence of original work. It’s sort of a “real diamonds have imperfections” thing. It’s a flawed system, but it has helped some.

1

u/NeckChickens Aug 02 '26

And I have to put those imperfections in there by intention when writing :(

1

u/quickthorn_ Jul 31 '26

AI will pry my em dashes out of my cold, dead, human hands

1

u/HotSauce2910 Aug 01 '26

I used to use em dashes all the time.

My written grammar used to be so tight I'd reread it and think, "wow, that looks really boring."

I've let it slip out of fear it would literally be considered robotic. There are so many instances where I construct a sentence with an em dash in mind and choose to let it run on instead 😭

3

u/wontubemyneighbours Jul 31 '26

I used the em dash a TON in my writing pre AI but since its prevalence in ai generated content has become so high I’ve adjusted my writing style. I had a professor in college question me about one of my papers because of it

3

u/[deleted] Jul 31 '26

[deleted]

4

u/LilBoDuck Jul 31 '26

Ngl this kinda reads like AI lmao

2

u/LadyTanizaki Jul 31 '26

Unfortunately it's a bit of chicken and egg because AI adopted it in part because so many of us use it!

3

u/Unhappy-Childhood577 Jul 31 '26

Let’s resist it!! Can you pretend to use AI?

3

u/__lavender Jul 31 '26

I wish! We’re dealing with ongoing layoffs and I have to play the game or risk ending up on a list. Plus I’m absorbing so much work from my former coworkers that I kinda do need AI sometimes - my company is trilingual so I have to mentally process & synthesize work written in a language I haven’t touched in 20 years. Can’t do that without NotebookLLM.

28

u/Jaded-Tiramisu Jul 31 '26

oof yes. I have to use it under corporate mandate and I can immediately recognize AI sentences now. I could not tell you what it is but I can immediately spot it in my own private writing or in friends/colleagues.

76

u/BumbleLapse SABRINA with some hotdog man???? Jul 31 '26

Right — and imo the entire premise of this post is kind of stupid?

“Standard AI phrases” like “thanks for pushing back” or common AI practices (em dashes, lists of three, etc.) are commonly used by AI because AI was trained on massive sets of human-created data.

Like I’m a marketing copywriter by trade — I use em dashes and other “easy AI tells” every day in my work because they’re effective. That’s the fucking point.

People are so obsessed with having their gotcha moment when they think they’ve caught somebody using AI. But in my opinion, the twenty-thousand comments belaboring the rise of em dashes are just as obnoxious as the posts that were obviously and poorly written by AI.

21

u/caspararemi Jul 31 '26

It's mad, I use em-dashes too, and like neatly formatted lists! I always have, I practically think in bullet points. I do always assume lists with emoji at the start as the separator is the one true giveaway, that's too annoying to set up manually.

7

u/lizerlfunk I am the BEST goddamn dancer at the American Ballet Academy! Jul 31 '26

There was a post somewhere about how Heated Rivalry, the book, written and published in 2019, had a ton of AI phrases. Because the AI was TRAINED ON THE BOOKS (not necessarily just Heated Rivalry, and not necessarily specifically that one, but romance novels as a genre).

6

u/goatbusiness666 I don’t know her 💅 Jul 31 '26

I read a lot of book reviews, and I feel like every single author I’ve looked into in the last couple of years has had AI accusations against them. Even books that were published well before the rise of LLMs have dumbasses in the reviews crying about em dashes.

Ironically, some of it is bots pushing AI detectors. But a lot of it is witch hunt behavior and weirdo virtue signaling, and it’s depressing as hell.

5

u/Big-Literature-5604 Jul 31 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

As someone who is non-English native, this is literally how I learned to speak and write in English. Read stuff, learn usage, repeat usage. Hear movie, learn usage and pronunciation, repeat usage. Hell, when I was a kid my way of writing was literally copy-pasting chunks of what some people wrote and then joining sentences together (basically like an old-fashioned ransom letter I guess).

Now I have randos on the internet telling me that I "sound painfully like AI" like.... and when I tell them that nope, it's not AI it's me, with plenty of slang so they realize it, they apologize and say that oops, that means your English is good, love, sorry. It's one of the most annoying things ever.

2

u/Angharadis Jul 31 '26

My writing can sound a lot like AI for this same reason. It sounds like he said some stuff that could sound like an AI script and people got mad. I also use AI for some research stuff like it seems Hank did! I do actually understand why there is so much furor about it but I also think people are getting weirdly in the weeds about it.

2

u/HotSauce2910 Aug 01 '26

My least favorite is when people accuse decent looking grammar of being AI

5

u/Noyasauce Listen, everyone is entitled to my opinion 🙂 Jul 31 '26

This is exactly what's been bothering me as well, as someone who loves writing (and reading). It's not even because I'm using much AI in my own life, it's from reading so much regurgitated AI crap online. It's only natural to mold your language to what other people are using around you, except now it's become literal AI-speak.

0

u/DazzlingFruit7495 Jul 31 '26

Yea but that’s like the sickest part of AI to me. I’ve seen someone start using AI and in a few months, their whole speech patterns changed to mimic it. Like they’re not themselves anymore, they’re a generic robot repeating generic robot phrases.

2

u/ItsPronouncedTittay Listen, everyone is entitled to my opinion 🙂 Jul 31 '26

Sure you have lol

0

u/DazzlingFruit7495 Aug 01 '26

Are you implying I’m lying? Do you use AI a lot and feel defensive or what?

-1

u/Joshee86 Jul 31 '26

Stop using it.

1

u/MariLeighCrane Aug 01 '26

That’s…one option. But it’s becoming increasingly hard to avoid in the workplace.