The pair started their channel, Vlogbrothers, in 2007 as an experiment to strengthen their fraternal bond, and as they grew their audience, they published best-selling books, raised money for various charities, and started VidCon, the largest convention for YouTubers, now attended by tens of thousands of people each year. In 2018, Viacom bought VidCon for an undisclosed amount, and in 2024, after Viacom changed its name to Paramount, it sold the convention to the British publishing conglomerate Informa. Today, the Greens’ production company, Complexly, produces science, culture, and history videos for more than a dozen YouTube channels, and also produces the Eons program for PBS in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios. Earlier this year, Complexly became a nonprofit.
Complexly’s programming positions Hank as a sort of present-day Bill Nye the Science Guy. In Ask Hank Anything, popular influencers ask him science questions, and Hank answers using researched responses. It was in one of these responses where Hank uttered “I appreciate the pushback.” Later, he said that he had increased his use of ChatGPT for this kind of research. “The more time I spent with it, the more every problem was starting to look like an LLM-shaped problem. And that’s dumb.”
The mission statement posted to Complexly’s website says that the company works to “create trustworthy stuff that inspires curiosity and lowers barriers to knowledge-building.”
So what happens if the “trustworthy stuff” starts feeling fishy?
“The creator economy is predicated on the ideals of authenticity, relatability, and—increasingly—vulnerability,” said Brooke Erin Duffy, a professor and media researcher at Cornell University, who studies “authenticity policing,” the phenomenon in which audiences scrutinize whether something is real or fake. “When creators outsource their labor—whether by hiring an assistant or, in this case, turning to AI—the individualized nature of creative production is called into question.”
Hank’s audience was already policing his authenticity before the “pushback” incident. On July 22, a Redditor noticed that a diagram that Hank had included in another video appeared to be AI-generated and mislabeled. Shortly after the Reddit post went up, Hank cut the image from the video. In a comment on the post, he said that he had independently made the decision to pull the image. “I knew it was AI generated. Look at it! But I think I just was like ‘if it’s useful!!?’ But, like, it actually is not useful and I should’ve known better.”
It’s hard to stay authentic when you’re feeding a machine. The aesthetic for YouTube thumbnails was comically unnatural long before AI use became widespread. A skim of the videos on Hank’s main channel show a familiar formula: Hank stares at the viewer with a strained expression, often accompanied by a spicy phrase (“I Know Why Media Sucks Now”) plus a clickbaity title, like the one for the video on Complexly’s channel that included the “pushback” moment: “Does Hank Green Shave His Butt?” (He does not.)
These campy thumbnails are a byproduct of the YouTube algorithm. Creators make what they think the machine will want, and then the machine asks for more of it. And for a while, it works.
