Ceri Ashward ⋆｡˚

A fantasy author's personal blog and musings. Sharing snippets of work, character references, and much more. 100% recommend viewing this as the website not inline!

[ceriashward]

Heads up!

I do art for fun and relaxation. Any sketches, drawings, paintings, etcetera are just that. Relaxation.

I do not take commissions.

I haven't in 15 years, and I do not plan on returning to commission based work.

I did that enough in retail.

Thanks for the interest though, I guess.

[ceriashward]

Bestiary Progress

Other than the basic mundane creatures; the bestiary is up to two lesser cats, a snake, a rat, and I’m working through a canine. Being able to work on what animals and such I want characters to encounter is making it easier to figure out what all regions I want to include in the world. It’s also giving me time to figure out where those regions are in relation to magical sites and other…

Bestiary Progress

[ceriashward]

Building a Bestiary

So far, one of the world building tasks I’ve been focusing on is building out the more fantastical and magical creatures that my cast of characters will encounter. I’m focusing on the felines first, then canids, avians, and so on and so forth. While the world my characters will inhabit does share some of our own real animals, some need just that little bit of ｡* ✨ 𝓈𝓅𝒾𝒸𝑒 ✨ *｡. So far I have three…

Building a Bestiary

[ceriashward]

Books I've read recently...

As I mentioned on Tuesday, I’ve been busy with our local library’s Summer Reading Program. I’ve gotten through quite a few books on my TBR as well as my re-read list; but our program is not just reading! Oh no, our program also encourages: Scavenger Hunts Visiting a Zoo, Gallery, or Museum Attending Community events Participating in Library Programs Listening to Audiobooks Learning New…

Books I've read recently...

[ceriashward]

Learning Obsidian

How much of learning Obsidian is just printing out cheat sheets? Unlike Notion that has easy forward slash commands, Obsidian is a bit more involved with brackets and a lot more right clicking than I expected. I’m enjoying it, but man is there a bit of a learning curve. It does make sense from an author’s point of view though; Notion is unreliable and people have found their databases deleted…

Learning Obsidian

[ceriashward]

I've been busy...

That doesn’t mean much, but I’ve been doing a lot of things for IRL and my Health, as well as some heavy reading for my local library’s Summer Reading Program. I initially started my world building and note taking in Notion, but the lack of customization has really limited me creatively. So, I’m making the move to Obsidian. Give me some time to get used to it, but I am liking what I’ve seen so…

I've been busy...

[youngadultread]

“Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions. Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time. In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows: “The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.” In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts.”

—

PBS: Language as Prejudice - Myth #6: Women Talk Too Much (via misandry-mermaid)

Every EVERY women’s studies class I’ve been in has had this problem and failed to address it. 

(via iamayoungfeminist)

[ceriashward]

Last week I tried.

I tried to be there and to get things done. Between my youngest being part of the Special Olympics locally and a doctor’s appointment, I did my best to be out and about with family. A major cleaning day and I’m now on day three of recovery. With chronic illness you don’t get the unlimited reserve. I barely have the energy to even sit and research, let alone a short story or bits of…

[ceriashward]

Creative Writing: Of Golden Light and Dappled Grays

I went for a walk today under golden light and dappled grays. Everyone said it would be a beautiful day, and I could feel that. The sky was cloudless, and the grove of trees around the neighborhood diffused the sunlight. It is the one thing I loved the most about the neighborhood I lived in. Always calm and muted. Even with the tranquility, we had lots of visitors. Visitors who always seemed sad,…

Creative Writing: Of Golden Light and Dappled Grays

[ceriashward]

June 2026 Bake-Off Challenge Now Live

Live With Pride A 28-day collaborative drabble cycle within Tiny Tales Bakery — Welcome to This Month’s Challenge June’s challenge invites participants to explore themes of identity, belonging, self-expression, community, and authenticity. Pride means different things to different people. For some, it is celebration. For others, it is reflection, discovery, resilience, family, friendship, or…

June 2026 Bake-Off Challenge Now Live

[ceriashward]

On Sundays We...

Create – I finished off my second crochet project ever, started getting patterns for my next projects Inspire – Worked on 3d rendered characters and scenes for Tiny Tales Bakery, finalized the June Challenge List Wondered – Researched different areas where coffee grows mainly to verify local flora and fauna, went and cross referenced with 3rd Edition and 5th Edition Monster Manuals and Dungeon…

[justalurkr]

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.

[irispurpurea]

This is the paper. It's excellent, highly recommend reading it.

I remember reading about Gebru's firing but I had no idea this was the paper she was fired over.

[ceriashward]

The Risen

It started like any other night, especially when the veil was thin. Our small seaside village welcomed the spirits of those who were lost at sea in the past year. Our priestess, pale-skinned and ethereal-looking, adorned in the colors of the deep ocean, had already started preparing for this night’s work. I watched in amazement. My lifelong aspiration was to train as a priestess, welcoming the…

The Risen

[tankie-transfeminist]

Today I wanted to talk about Kyle Bassinga. Kyle was a 21 year old man from Georgia, whose family described him as "a kind, thoughtful, and smart young man who loved nature, music, and the people around him". Kyle Bassinga was killed on February 18th 2026, just ten days after his birthday. He was found hanging from a tree in a park.

The police ruled it a suicide. The family and local community demanded an investigation. The police refused to change their ruling.

I know this website it too white for this to really go anywhere, but an understanding of the present reality of white supremacy in the United States is just so important to transfeminism here. Lynchings never stopped, white supremacy never went away, you just stopped looking.

[ceriashward]

A Post Apocalyptic Siren's Song

A soft humming rode the wind—strange, yet familiar. The tune teased his memory, as if it had followed him since childhood. He had never seen a person—or any creature—linked to the sound. For years, he dismissed it as a sound from the old power lines, long abandoned in this changed world. But today, the humming was different. There was a proper voice associated with it, if only he could find…

A Post Apocalyptic Siren's Song

[ceriashward]

Creative Writing: ... and Stormy Night

“If only they would tell the truth,” the lost girl mused. Katie watched as the teens in the group wandered into the woods. “If these children knew my story, they would never come out here.” Only a few would be returning, and they wouldn’t be returning whole. She knew this from the moment she issued the challenge over a hundred years ago. She was killed right here, in the woods, at the very spot…

Creative Writing: ... and Stormy Night

[ceriashward]

Creative Writing: The Darkened...

The night, dark and stormy as always, felt cliché. And the first person who could find the totem left behind would be the winner of this strange game. They decided to play a game based on the stories they told as kids as a joke. The ones that made you think twice before sleeping in the dark of your bedroom. The spooky stories that were certain to give you a slight fright. But this little game was…