Hank Green apologises for using ChatGPT to help write his YouTube scripts
The popular science communicator says he got caught up in the dopamine hit of doing more with AI, and admits he lost track of how much the technology shaped his own words.
Key points
- Hank Green, a YouTuber with 3.2 million subscribers, apologised in May 2025 for using ChatGPT to help research and write scripts for his educational videos.
- Viewers suspected AI involvement after Green accidentally left in the phrase "I appreciate the pushback," a turn of phrase typical of chatbot responses.
- Green deleted his initial explanation on X and posted a longer apology on Reddit, calling himself "mortified."
- He plans to slow down his video output and focus on writing he "felt all the way down."
- Green listed climate costs and corporate power among his concerns about AI, even as he admitted he had been using it more than was healthy.
Hank Green makes science feel approachable. Across several YouTube channels, including the educational network Complexly, his 3.2 million subscribers tune in for his own voice. So when that voice started sounding a little off, people noticed.
The trouble began mid-video, when Green used the phrase "I appreciate the pushback." It's a line that chatbots, including ChatGPT, produce constantly. Viewers flagged it immediately, wondering whether it had slipped in from an AI response to one of Green's own prompts rather than from a real conversation with the episode's guest.
What did Hank Green actually admit?
He confirmed he had used ChatGPT, the widely known AI chatbot made by OpenAI, to help research scripts. He insists the opinions and the final wording were still his own, but he acknowledged the criticism was fair.
Green first addressed the story in a post on X, which he later deleted. He then wrote a fuller apology on Reddit, saying he was "mortified" that he had "let so many people down." He framed his AI use as a research shortcut: locating academic papers and background reading, not generating finished sentences. But he admitted it was reasonable to call that "diluting" himself.
First reported by TechCrunch AI, the story quickly spread because Green is one of the more prominent voices in the science-communication world, a space where trust in the author matters enormously.
Why does this matter for ordinary viewers?
When you watch an educational video, you are trusting that the person talking has genuinely thought through the material. If an AI chatbot summarised the research, the presenter may have absorbed a simplified or even subtly wrong version of the facts without realising it.
Green himself made a version of this point. "I've been moving so fast that my own process isn't actually clear to me," he wrote. That is an honest admission: speed, helped along by AI, had blurred the line between his thinking and the machine's.
He also called out the addictive pull of the technology directly. "The level of dopamine I've been getting from interacting with LLMs," he wrote, using the shorthand for large language models, the AI systems behind tools like ChatGPT, "is not healthy for me or good for the world."
What happens next?
Green is posting less. He wants to slow down, make fewer videos, and return to writing that feels entirely his own.
He pointed to a recent meditative video as the kind of work he wants to do more of. He also mentioned leaning toward "dumb unscripted straight to camera thoughts," which is perhaps the clearest possible signal that a creator is stepping back from AI assistance.
Green says he is not an AI opponent. He listed real concerns: the energy AI data centres consume, and the speed at which big tech companies are trying to consolidate economic power. But his main worry right now seems more personal. "What I am most scared of," he wrote, "is ruining myself for people."
