One of YouTube’s biggest names says he is stepping back from producing as much content as he reckons with his relationship with AI to help generate videos.
Hank Green has been a YouTube mainstay for nearly 20 years as one half of the Vlogbrothers alongside brother and author John Green, as well as the host and creator of educational series SciShow and CrashCourse. He boasts more than 12 million followers across his social media platforms and about 32 million subscribers across his various YouTube channels.
Green apologized online after fans criticized him for his AI use in a video script. Last week, fans noted his use of the phrase “I appreciate the pushback” in a recent video, a phrase commonly used by chatbots in response to users’ input, leading some to believe Green was reading a script generated by AI.
In a now-deleted X post, Green said he used ChatGPT to research the video’s script, but that the phrase used was impromptu and said in response to a conversation with a guest in the video. Green added he was “under a ton of pressure” to produce the video.
“I’m mortified that I have let so many people down and I think I understand how that happened,” Green wrote on Reddit this week. “I’m going to change things about how i make stuff.”
Green said he plans to pause videos on his personal channel, hankschannel, as well as SMUSH and 4×3, online daily word puzzles he produces.
“I have been relying too heavily on AI as a research aid,” Green continued. “It can be very useful for this task, giving me access to a lot of papers I didn’t know existed really fast, but I think that has been to the detriment of my work because it has not given me the freedom to find all of my own ways into and around a topic.”
Green, through a representative, did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
AI’s productivity trap
AI as a productivity tool has received mixed reviews from researchers and users. While agentic AI and large-language models are associated with greater output, heavy reliance on the technology, such as using four or more tools concurrently, has also been associated with “AI brain fry” in the workplace. The Harvard Business Review warned earlier this year that the proliferation of AI will intensify work, allowing workers to access more information and get more done, with burnout, fatigue, and weakened decision-making emerging as consequences of the productivity jolt.
Meanwhile, online audiences are hungrier than ever to consume content, spending an average of more than two hours daily on social media. Pew Research Center found YouTube holds the top stop among social media platforms, with 84% of U.S. adults reporting using the app, and Gen Z using the site not just for news and short-form bursts of entertainment, but as a replacement for cable television.
Green’s own admission of using AI to quickly aggregate research to drive content creation may allude to a similar phenomenon of losing his own creative discretion amid growing demand for online content.
“Ultimately, what I am most scared of is ruining myself for people, but I have not been managing my impulses well,” Green said. “You need to know that my words are mine. I don’t think that this hasn’t been true, but I’ve been moving so fast that my own process isn’t actually clear to me and I want to have it be a guarantee moving forward.”
How YouTube is grappling with the rise of AI
Green is not the only one reckoning with the intersection of AI and video content creation. Earlier this year, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said reducing “AI slop” and identifying deepfakes were among the platform’s priorities going into 2026.
“It’s becoming harder to detect what’s real and what’s AI-generated,” Mohan wrote in his annual letter in January. “This is particularly critical when it comes to deepfakes.”
YouTube has not eschewed AI entirely, but even its efforts to incorporate the technology into its app has been received poorly by users. Last summar, YouTube used AI to select excerpts of videos that answered user’s search queries and piece them together into a slideshow users would have to click on to get an answer to what they searched. Rather than centering the creator of the video, the platform instead prioritized the information that creator was giving. The feature launched in June 2025 for premium subscribers in the U.S., but was quietly
“People just didn’t like it,” Emily Moxley, YouTube’s vice president of product management, told Semafor. “Viewers want to hear from creators… the story and the information that creators can supply is something that we can’t replace,” she told Semafor.
Green himself criticized AI, but said he is not opposed to it entirely. In the Reddit post, Green said he was disturbed by how AI models are trained, and said he was concerned by the ways in which AI companies have consolidated economic power and exacerbated global climate risks. However, he said he’s “not a pure AI-hater.”
“It is very likely that you (the reader) and I disagree on how or even whether AI should be used,” Green said. “I think it makes sense for that disagreement to exist. But I have also always believed that my audience is more likely to be right than I am. You know what this feels like in a way I can’t. And I am so sorry for diluting myself in this way and harming the thing that we have all built together.”
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