I Am Worry Girl

[deluxc]

you probably know me as the ask polly poster or the cute housefly oc haver or the animal fiction reblogger or just the blogger who's bunny.

i wear many hats and i don't often put them all in the same place. check out my other blogs! i'm a sideblog!

 ♡ del / she/her / 25 / more

 🪰 writing/oc main

 🐍 xenofiction sideblog

 🐰 lovely mongmongs artist

[murkymarco]

Caught myself spiraling and then remembered it's just my body not wanting to exist in these temperatures

[targetedknowledge]

[hungry-hobbits]

"get ready for video games to become unaffordable" video games haven't been affordable for the last 10 years

[taffywabbit]

made a really cool image tonight i think

[scribeherself]

people will say “they’re only friends” and then show me two people who would crawl through broken glass to hear the other laugh once. two people who have memorized each other’s coffee orders, fears, childhood stories, and emergency contacts. two people who would haunt each other’s houses as ghosts. be serious.

[scribeherself]

Just an FYI—the original intention of this post was to challenge the way people say only friends, as though friendship is somehow lesser than other forms of love. As if being deeply known, cherished, and chosen by another person could ever be a small thing. Normalize profound platonic love. Some of the most fulfilling, transformative, and enduring relationships we will ever have are friendships. 🫶🏼

[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.

[thesilveregg]

Scorpy’s prophecy

[busket]

they've been arguing about malgendering on twitter so here's the truth from me, the arbiter of truth (jk but ive been talking about malgendering long before it became a popular buzzword and heres my understanding of it)

malgendering is a form of transphobia wherein a transphobic person uses their victim's correct gender to harass or demean them. it is meant to be the inverse of misgendering, where a transphobe uses the victim's incorrect gender to harass or demean them.

misgendering towards trans women can be as simple as "youre a man." but malgendering is more insidious, like someone saying "you really are a girl" when she makes a mistake in order to insult her intelligence. the phrase "you really are a girl" is positive when removed from the context of the trans woman making a mistake and the transphobe's sarcastic tone that implies shes stupid in an misogynistic way.

if a trans man does something like standing up for himself against an unfair situation or asks for better accommodations/treatment, and a transphobe wants to use that to imply he is selfish and entitled, they might say "trans men really are men" which again, is a true statement on its own. but in the context of the situation, its clear the transphobe is using the stereotypical worst qualities of men to insult and undermine someone's very identity.

malgendering can be any severity of harm, just like misgendering. my mom slipping up in the first months of my transition and accidentally calling me "she", and a bigot shouting "YOURE A WOMAN YOULL NEVER BE A MAN" at me are both examples of misgendering, but one is much worse than the other and its the same with malgendering. being told "trans men are the men of the trans community" as an insult is annoying and rude but not a big deal. however, right now ICE is torturing trans men in concentration camps by forcing them to do pointless and grueling labor. and when they become exhausted, theyre told "I thought you were a man. if youre really a man this should be easy for you" these are both examples of malgendering. one is a microaggression, the other is literal torture.

malgendering happens equally to both trans men and trans women, its not something that is unique to anyone because it is a form of transphobia. the strategy is that if a transphobe tries to make a trans persons life as their true gender so miserable and unsafe, detransitioning seems like the safer and happier option. its psychological torment, moreso than the plain and obvious insult of intentional misgendering. so dont let it happen, call it out when you see it and dont be fooled by transphobes trying to erase the context and be like "what!! what i said was true!"

[littlescratches]

For my own understanding, let me try to boil down your explanation into a one sentence definition:

Malgendering is the action of maliciously burdening a trans person with the stereotypes about their true gender, with the intent of making living as said gender seem less favorable.

Does that catch what you're trying to say? Because from your post I'm not sure of the intent bit.

[busket]

yes! the transphobic person may not be aware of their intent and not even know what they're doing, most of the time theyll deny that they are being tranphobic because they think theyre 'affirming" someones gender. it serves as an easy way out and often malgendering is more like a dogwhistle, only some people can hear it. but yes, that is the "purpose" of malgendering.

[busket]

and you could argue "well thats just sexism. treating a trans woman like shes stupid or slutty because shes a woman is just misogyny. treating a trans man like he must be entitled or predatory because hes a man is just misandry" yes and no, because the context matters.

saying these things to a trans person with the knowledge that theyre trans has an underlying implication: "you wouldn't be bad if you weren't trans". when you tell a trans men that all men should die and you hate all men, youre telling him "you wouldnt be evil if you detransitioned. everyone would be kind to you if you were still a girl" and same with trans women: "you would be smarter and respected if you weren't a woman. I wouldnt harass you if you were still a man."

malgendering says "these are the consequences of being a man/woman, and im going to make sure you suffer them."

[weepingwidar]

Hayley Chiu (Chinese-Canadian, 2001) - What Does the Cicada Know of Ice? (2026)

[milk5-deactivated20260704]

Medieval dungeon chatroom

InnocentCobbler: I Can't take much more...

☝️5 😭4 💀6 😬2

torturevictim12: heeeeeelllllllllppppp

☝️6 🫣3 👻4 🗣️4 😈1

Smellysickly: 🐀🐀💩🐀🐀🤢🐀💩💩🐀💩

🤮4 🪰5 🧟‍♂️4 💯1

ScremWhenYouSeeMe [MOD]: Hey guys my kid is dunking a witch in front of the king today. Would it be okay if I took the day off and just let you starve a bit?

😄6 ✨4 🥰5 🫶3 🎉4 🧙6 🫧5 😢1

InnocentCobbler: 👍

🙏5 💯6 😝3 🎊4 😮‍💨1

Smellysickly: Go for it! 😁

🌟3 👍5 ☝️4 😇4 🙄1

torturevictim12: moans happily

🇲5 🇴5 🇦5 🇳5 🇸5 😠1

i_deserve_it: Breaking wheel today plss

😮‍💨5 😡6 🤬6 🖕5 🛑6 🤐4

💬 Several people are typing...

[onekisstotakewithme]

having online friends who are busy is just like. I LOVE YOU. I miss you. YOU GOT THIS. I'm giving you space to work. I LOVE YOU.

[onekisstotakewithme]

reminder to everyone i haven't talked to lately: I love you. we'll be fine. I LOVE YOU. I am waiting for you. I hope you are well. I love you.

[rubysapphrald]

i feel so defensive and protective of people with ARFID like if i had a disorder that made my brain register 90% of food as poison for no reason and i had a bazillion people on the internet constantly calling me a manchild who needs to just grow up and stop being a picky eater i would start killing people

[gaslit-dipshits]

[appalachian-werewolf]

PoweredByWho — Who's Building Data Centers in Your Backyard?

Follow the money behind America's data center boom. Track 2,300+ projects, PAC spending, and the politicians who sign off on it.

[caffedorzo]

so exhausted by how fundamentally anti-human the capitalist world has become. like ageing, getting fat, being slightly inefficient, and making mediocre art are all extremely normal and extremely human activities, why is every corporation trying to convince us to spend all our money fighting that

[mchi22]

not to just repost scorpys instagram story but this fucking took me out

[trippiest]

what a beautiful day to not be in high school

[gayofthefae]

This is the like those “remember to be grateful you don’t have a sore throat right now” posts. It IS a beautiful day to not be in high school! Thank you!