The Glimmer in our Eye - with Grant Sanderson from 3Blue1Brown

Brady Haran (0:01)

Since the possible solving of the elusive Navier-Stokes problem, insert asterisk here, it seems everyone's talking about AI and mathematics. I mean, they're talking about AI everywhere, aren't they? But it's certainly making its presence felt in the world of math. I've been talking to a few people about it recently, and one of them is Grant Sanderson. Grant runs the wildly popular and undoubtedly excellent YouTube channel, 3Blue1Brown. I'm sure most of you watch it. But Grant's also just a clever, thoughtful guy, who spends a lot of time thinking about all aspects of math, be it proofs, communication, education. He's also just written an excellent article about what the future might look like for mathematicians. It was guest posted on Terry Tao's blog, and of course, I will link to that below.

But before I started asking Grant about all that big picture stuff, I wanted to find out whether AI was having an impact on him personally, as a guy who makes YouTube videos.

As a math communicator and someone who makes your living from making videos about maths and communicating maths, how has AI affected you? Are you using it? Is it creating problems for you with competition and stuff like that? Tell me about how AI affects Grant Sanderson and 3Blue1Brown.

Grant Sanderson (1:24)

Man, okay. I feel like every time that you ask about AI in some way, it's worth separating out what specifically you mean, because it can mean like 20 different things. And so on this front, you've got like using it as part of the creation pipeline, is like one way that question would be relevant. One is like as a topic matter for videos, because I have a series about neural networks, there's like demand for more things like that. There is, we won't call them 3Blue1Brown copycats, but we'll say like people who want to make end to end LLM creates a math video on YouTube. A natural way to do that is by using the tool that I use for the videos because it's programmatic and like that's something LLMs are very good at.

And then there's like, you actually were describing this before we recorded and it resonated so much where you said you feel a certain obligation to like comment about the goings on of AI and math. And you're like, I kind of want to just keep doing my normal thing. And so one of the most salient things in my mind for how it's affected it is I've had this project going for like over a year and a half of collecting interview footage with mathematicians for their thoughts on AI and math with the intent of making like a documentary type thing with it, which I will make. It kind of feels like a burden on the shoulders of a thing that I kind of have to do. We're like, okay, okay, I've got to make use of this. I've got to make some kind of comment in the space, which feels slightly at odds with just what I love doing, showing the beauty of math and diving into a problem. I think the spirit of your question was maybe in that first category of using it in production. And even that splits into, forgive me for just breaking this all down into this infinite tree, but that splits down into so many different things because you've got, there are tools for AI to translate your content. You've got image generation and video generation type stuff. You get writing the script. I mean, you've got creating the code for it, doing research for it.

So some of these seem like, some of them are just toxic, right? Like using it for video generation or image generation. One, the results just aren't great. But even to the extent that they may be okay, it's just a third rail, right? Like the brand damage associated with that is nowhere near worth it.

This year, so I went from working solo last year, where a notable difference this year is like, I have two artists who work with me right now. One is an intern, one is something closer to full-time. And it's just much more fun, I think, to work with them than to try to like fiddle around with those tools. The result is just better. And you don't get that, there's no like controversy or anything around it. And if anything, it's kind of like nicer to plant a flag in the sand of like, no, we do like handcrafted, like lovingly created artwork for new artwork that there is.

Brady Haran (4:05)

Obviously, the nature of your videos that are very, you know, they are made with software and computer animation. Are you finding people are accusing you of making them with AI anyway, despite the fact you're hand crafting them?