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.
do you guys think that when Stratt was going through the vlogs she got to the “so I met an alien” part and was like ‘shit he went crazy’ only to see Rocky roll on screen like 3 videos later
all i want for 2026 is that gigantic rancid AI bubble to finally burst in such a catastrophic way that the consequences will be so good and i'll never have to see another AI generated image ever again
Anita Sarkeesian, feminist who interpreted media under a feminist lens. She did a series about video games and she was the subject of targeted harassment. That was the start of gamergate
Minor correction, the start of gamergate was based around a different reporter, Zoe Quinn, but they were both absolutely violently threatened over their involvement in video game criticism and development. A hate campaign was started by Quinn's ex-boyfriend when he wrote a post falsely accusing them of dating video game journalists in order to receive positive reviews on their own game, Depression Quest, which led other bad actors to accuse all women in the industry (Zoe identified as female at the time) of perceived sexual immorality. Anita Sarkeesian's brilliant Youtube series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (which everyone should watch, right now) sparked a particular nerve for criticizing popular games of killing and/or victimizing any important female character (there is a CHILLING bit that borders on ludicrous where she describes the plots of a seemingly endless parades of games as "In [title], [male player character's] wife dies, and you then have to rescue [his] daughter."). That series did actually make a huge change in the industry, especially when touted by progressive legacy developers like Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, Psychonauts), who went on to expand hiring in his company to front women and minority voices, but the shift didn't really show for a long time and echoes of the sexism that plagues the industry at its core are still rampant.
Thanks for the correction! I was like 8-10 years old when this all went down (2014-2016) so I only know vaguely about it. I’m still learning about this.
So funny how Spock is like "affection is alien to me, love is unobtainable, I have no idea how I would ever approach a woman" and then you see his parents and their comfortable open PDA, that is the first FIRST thing you see about Sarek and Amanda. It just really puts into perspective how broken and queer Spock really is. Bro is FUCKED up. Spock my black metal queen
Watsonian/Doylist analysis applies to human anatomy too. When I ask "why can't teeth heal?", I'm not looking to find out more about teeth, I just want to make a complaint.
since it's new doccy whomst's anniversary i think it bears repeating how fucking incredible eccleston's performance as nine was. the fact in 13 episodes he got so many amazing moments ('clinging to the skin of this tiny little world', 'you think it'll last forever', 'why don't you just die', 'i never had a life like that', 'everybody lives', the whole 'no' speech in bad wolf) isn't just testament to the writers but a credit to how damn good he was as the doctor
In hindsight, Sloan repeatedly pulling the whole "enigmatically appears in your home without you seeing them enter" thing on Bashir is weird because this is a setting where teleportation is a fundamental part of day-to-day life. There's a mystery of how he beamed onto the station maybe, but Bashir's bedroom isn't anymore of a flex than just bothering him at work or during his downtime.
Therefore, I propose that the intimidation tactic wasn't appearing in his bedroom in itself, but instead Sloan trying to unnerve Bashir by deliberately emulating a scene from a trashy spy romance story that Bashir didn't want anyone knowing he liked.
My favorite scenes in the LotR books are the ones where Legolas has vital information and just decides it's not important to share.
Like when Gandalf spent literal PAGES trying to figure out why the vibes were off in Moria and Legolas chimes in with just "it's a balrog :) that shit's evil :) we're so fucked :)" like what do you MEAN you knew already and just didn't tell him??
Or at the beginning of Two Towers when Aragorn thinks there's something nearby so he puts his ear to the ground to listen, and then like 10 minutes later is like "hmmm i hear horses" and Legolas is just like "mm yep. there are 105 blond bitches with spears" like you just let your friend put his face in the dirt and you can SEE them??
It's because legolas hasn't spent enough time with non-elves to remember that they don't know what he knows.
gandalf is scratching his head in moria, and legolas is thinking "oh man, the wizard noticed something off *besides* the obvious balrog that we all are aware of??"
"I wonder what aragorn is listening for? must be hard to hear, what with all of the horses. How many horses are there, actually? 1... 2... 3..."
"What do your elvish eyes see?" is Aragorn saying, as politely as possible, "Because the REST OF US are at a significant disadvantage, Prince Dipshit."
Former Infinity Ward developer Chance Glasco has claimed Activision had previously pressured Infinity Ward to feature a fictional invasion o
Chance Glasco, one of the co-founders of Infinity Ward and creators of the Call of Duty franchise, has claimed that Activision once pressured the studio to include an invasion of Israel by Iran.
This came after Call of Duty gameplay footage was used in a video released by the White House X account, showing a character calling in a Kill Streak before a montage of real-world military bombing footage. Explosions shown in the video are presented alongside '+100' point indicators, echoing kills using killstreaks in Call of Duty games.
In response to this video, Glasco wrote on his personal social media account: "This doesn't surprise me. I remember after Activision took over post-Respawn formation there was a very awkward pressure from Activision for us to make the next CoD about Iran attacking Israel. Luckily the vast majority of our devs were disgusted by the idea and it got shot down."
He would further elaborate on this, in a response to social media reactions to the same White House video. In one tweet, Glasco claims: "A lot of us devs were appalled because it felt like political propaganda being pushed by Activision."
When asked why depictions of an Iranian invasion of Israel felt like political propaganda, while fictional military depictions in other countries like the UK and Mexico were okay, Glasco elaborated on his stance. He said: "My point is that the government would happily use entertainment, including video games, as a way to sway public opinion on major issues. There have been decades of pressure for a war with Iran across multiple administrations. The scenarios you mentioned, not so much."
Very interesting tidbit from the last paragraph of this article, where they note this particular administration has been using videogame footage to promote their crimes against humanity both at home and abroad. And apparently it's a "huge success with gamers".
[Image ID: Tumblr reply from sludgeBitch reading: to be fucked in the ass: to receive a penis or other objects within the butthole
to be fucked in the arse: £6 a pint /End ID]
Due to some easy to pronounce concept that has four harsh syllables, Worf considers himself to be extremely close friends with Keiko O'Brien in a way that is utterly unbreakable, a fact that Miles finds at least mildly annoying in a way that doesn't entirely count as jealousy. Worf feels so duty-bound by it, he wishes to avoid becoming even more entangled by it. Keiko herself also prefers to keep Worf at more a distance than he would insist their bond would justify, but *does* appreciate that he has always, no matter how dire the circumstances, sent Molly an elaborate (if not perhaps overly Klingon) gift, every birthday.
and a hell of a lot more! Also this is a huge shout out to any of my friends who still use Skype – I don’t use it, I use Discord. Mail me and I’ll shoot you my details :)
One thing I really like and find personally resonant about Julian Bashir is the fact that he's filled with passion and curiosity and enthusiasm but is also a judgmental hater. Responding to the new Defiant with "I hate the carpet." Responding to Jadzia saying "What I want is Worf" with "Why?" It's a pettiness distinct from his righteous anger over genuine injustice and it really speaks to me.
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