shout out to the buzzfeed 'which avenger are you' quiz i just did that had it's final question be 'which avenger would you want to make out with' and when i answered steve rogers immediately told me i was iron man #stonytruthers
Missed your chance to sign up for the exchange? Get on our pinch-hitter list!
What does a pinch-hitter do?
A pinch-hitter creates a work in the place of someone who had to drop out of the exchange. Pinch-hitters only create a gift for someone else, they do not receive gifts.
When we need a pinch-hitter, we will send out an email to everyone on the pinch-hitter list asking if they would like to claim the work. The first pinch-hitter to reply back claiming it gets to create the gift.
The list is open to all ages, but you must have an AO3 account to be a pinch-hitter.If you’d like to get your email added to that list, send an email at any time before June 21st to [email protected]. Just tell us your username on AO3 and let us know if you are okay with creating explicit works or are under 18.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
Most Beloved (non-canon) Queer Ship Tournament - Round 3
Which queer ship do you love more?
Lumiere and Cogsworth (Beauty and the Beast)*
Matt Murdock/Foggy Nelson (Daredevil)*
how dare you make me choose
Voting ended onJun 2
Disclaimer: This tournament is based on submissions! Please respect all identities, characters and fandoms! Hate or aggressive language (even if jokingly) will get you blocked instantly!
Most Beloved (non-canon) Queer Ship Tournament - Round 3
Which queer ship do you love more?
Dr. Barbara Ann Minerva / Diana of Themyscira (DC)*
Tony Stark x Steve Rogers (MCU)
how dare you make me choose
Voting ended onJun 2
Disclaimer: This tournament is based on submissions! Please respect all identities, characters and fandoms! Hate or aggressive language (even if jokingly) will get you blocked instantly!
heyyy i don't mean to be breaking any boundaries but am i allowed to ask if you're an adult or not ?? if you're uncomfortable with the answer that's okay!
Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: Gen
Warnings: None
Characters/Pairing: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Word count: 93
Link: None
Summary: Tony is a dog with a bone. Literally.
Author’s note: for round 64 of @lightsonparkave , inspired by this post about a dog burying a bone and love. I was going somewhere with this, but my brain melted before I got there.
Tony made for a weird dog—small-ish, fluffy, kind of yappy, something like a collie mixed with a pomeranian. He dashed around, barking his head off all day long. Steve couldn’t tell if he was stupid or a dog genius. Though to be fair, he often had the same doubts about the human version.
Currently, Tony was chewing on a bone he’d gotten somewhere and thus had become blessedly quiet.
Steve reached out a hand. “You like that?” He pet right between the floppy triangles of Tony's ears. The fur was incredibly soft.
It’s been ten years since Steve and Tony’s cataclysmic, universe-destabilizing breakup (look, all we’re saying is that it ripped the team apart and then Thanos killed half the universe), and enough time has passed for the flames to die down. Maybe. But what hasn’t died down is our fandom’s love for drama, and Civil War is THE Steve/Tony event so happy divorce-sary, fellow angst fiends.
To celebrate the tin anniversary (what’s the divorce equivalent of a wedding anniversary? Smashing the tin? Well, Steve did crumple the man in a (not tin) can’s armor with his shield), we’re getting the party started with a chill-for-a-not-so-chill-movie event: a prompt fest centered around Steve and Tony’s relationship during and after CA:CW!
The event is chill because there’s no commitment: there are NO minimum work requirements and NO sign-ups required to participate. ALL fanwork types and ratings are welcome, and you can submit and fill as many prompts as you’d like during the event. It’s a fun way to kick things off and we hope you join! But if a prompt fest isn’t your thing, not to worry—once it’s over, we’re continuing the festivities with a mini gift exchange.
A quick note on what we mean by Steve and Tony’s relationship and CA:CW–we accept Steve and Tony entangled in any way, whether platonically, romantically, or sexually, and canon-compliant, canon-divergent, post-CA:CW, and crossover and fusion prompts/works are all welcome. Ultimately, though, this is a Steve/Tony CA:CW event, so the focus should be on Steve, Tony, and CA:CW; we have more info about this in our guidelines linked below.
ABOUT THE ANNIVERSARY EVENT
SCHEDULE
April 12 (CA:CW world premiere): prompt submissions open
May 5: prompt submissions close at 11:59 PM EDT (what time is that for me?)
May 6 (CA:CW US release date): prompt list is posted
July 6: prompt fills are due at 11:59 PM EDT (what time is that for me?)
GENERAL GUIDELINES & FAQ
Make sure to review the general guidelines and FAQ before joining the fun!
PROMPT FEST GUIDELINES
See how this all works by reading the guidelines for the prompt fest portion of our anniversary event.
Questions? Don’t hesitate to contact us. We’re reachable by email, Tumblr, Twitter, and Bluesky.
Ready to submit prompts? Then prompt away using our submission form through May 5!
NOTE: I am not a mod, I'm just an enthusiastic participant who is more on tumblr than they are.
Mini FAQ from the mods below!
"Does the fill have to be sexual?"
There are no rating requirements! For example, 'human furniture' is still a kink even if it doesn't require explicitly sexual acts. You're also welcome to prompt/fill scenarios where the characters are unaware it's a kink scenario and the only people excited about it are us here, reading/viewing it.
"Is X a rare kink?"
There's no specific requirement, but if you're unlikely to get X in an exchange as a gift without a very lucky match, it probably belongs here. This can be heavily fandom-specific.
"Which fandom do I use to request Creator's Choice of Fandom?"
Unspecified Fandom!
"Can I re-prompt stuff from previous years?"
Reprompting is absolutely fine! Old RKBs are still open but obviously this set will suddenly have new eyes on it, so take advantage of it.
i was blessed with having TWO of my steve/tony prompts filled:
Look Into My Eyes (hypnosis kink!!) by @ayapandagirl
Moo (hucow steve and dark!(ish)tony!!) by sexy_sinful_writer
highly recommend checking them out, i love them so <333
i also filled a couple prompts, one of which is the first of an eventual series dubbed "tony stark's unauthorized sex tapes" (note that this first tape is the most awful in the series--though the unconventional format of the fic might make for a more digestible read, despite the implied content. still, definitely heed the warnings). find it here
and the second fill is part 1 of a 3-chaptered omegaverse, alpha knight steve/omega prince tony medieval au that got WAY out of hand, but which is turning into something quite exciting, i think... (also heed the warnings here--though this one has more of a bodice-ripping, 'dark romance' vibe despite the tags). find it here
dededos
stormborns
ellievsbear
discoholicmusic
jacobvanloon
areudirty
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
