Hank isn't going to stop using AI for research (and that's good)

Hank's AI policy doesn't stop him from using AI for research. It does include a provision that LLM outputs will never be trusted as a source which is good.

On AI sourcing, a few things.

First off, it's basically ubiquitous right now, most experts I've interacted with use AI as a research assistant, to expect science communicators not to use it is a weird standard and definitely out of touch.

It's also useful for timesaving and since Google has become so unusable, you can find a lot of prominent studies fast, which is better than just typing a topic in Google Scholar.

In my personal experience, I do save time and find relevant stuff faster with AI, the only drawback is that I don't find interesting random studies with some tangential information.

I'd agree that for things like meta studies you'd need a more formalised way to search for material, but that's not what Hank is doing.

Anyway, overall it's great that he didn't just cater to the most extreme of his critics while still addressing the underlying issue in his own way.

Creators aren't sock puppets, and they are allowed to exist outside off some moralistic standard of online communities (looking at you antiai people).