I like elves, dragons, weasels, trolls, and World of Warcraft stuff. I post my art here.
World of Warcraft characters:
Moloji, troll hunter
Niljemas, night elf rogue/death knight
Guchulag, troll shaman
Feather, troll priest
Nadizel, night elf druid
Najan, night elf hunter
Original characters:
Vroll (Kruvaas)
My ferret, Tavi.
MP100 Blog
8th Grade Jaimie v. Present Day Jaimie – I’ve gotten a lot less dark and edgy, but I still like to obsess about which breeds of horses would translate best into fantasy critters ❤️🐴
A big part of being a quadruped is being able to just lie down anytime. Waiting? Loaf time. Talking to someone shorter than you? Loaf time. Falling asleep in the sun? Loaf time. Bored? Loaf it up till something interesting happens. Leg hurt? Loaf time.
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.
gun to my head, you show me the cover and tell me to guess the plot, I a) would never have come up with something as painfully non-horny as above and b) no actually i'm still stuck on point a.
[ Image One: A Reddit post on r/litrpg by user whoshotthemouse that says "I'm finally launching!", with the cover of a book. The book title is "The Staff: A Different Kind of LITRPG" and the author's name is Wild Rabbit. The cover shows a shirtless man holding a caduceus staff, standing among ruins in front of a seemingly naked minotaur. Text below the cover of the book reads "EDIT: Thanks to everyone for the honest feedback.
Just to be clear - and here's a brand new sentence for you - no, this book does not contain gay minotaur sex. Not even a little bit.
I'm going back to the drawing board with my artist tomorrow, and we're going to make a cover that conveys more accurately the precise amount of hot minotaur sex in this novel, which again, is zero.
EDIT 2: Apparently I also owe an apology to the small (but vocal) contingent who really wanted this to be minotaur smut. Sorry to let you down."
Image Two: A screenshot of tags that read "#this is why you cant judge a book by its cover #because sometimes the author's vision is delusional"
Image Three: Screenshot of text that reads "Book overview
The true story (-ish) of what really happened to America's most infamous thief.
Mere minutes after completing his legendary robbery, the man known to history as "DB Cooper" finds himself inside a strange underground maze full of magic and monsters, armed only with his wits, a half-loaded .22 revolver, and $200,000 in unmarked, non-consecutive one hundred-dollar bills."
Two reblogs down, there are two screenshots from reddit.
In the first: the author writes in a thread entitled, "Apparently I Make Minotaur Erotica Now, AMA":
I'm a straight man in my mid-40s. I'm married and I have a young child. And I'm starting to realize I'm just not nearly as horny as I used to be. Like I've mellowed, but the internet hasn't.
If we want to get super-Freudian, I would say that staves and swords can also represent manhood. So the sword represents on approach to being a man, and the staff is another approach -- probably a healthier one -- and part of what's happening in the book is Cooper is forced to learn that other approach.
Or everything can just be dongs I guess.
This is followed by a post in the same r/litrpg subreddit, presumably from the same author, entitled, "Announcing the 2026 Beefhammer Prize for Exellence in Minotaur Erotica", which goes onto say:
Listen, I get it guys. You really, really want me to make this book minotaur erotica. Like I know some of you are just screwing with me, but others are 100% serious when they say they feel personally let down. And while I simply will not -- cannot -- ruin something that I worked really hard on, I do want to offer the very passionate (and disturbingly large) pool of minotaur afficionados I've met this weekend some sort of olive branch. So here's what I'm going to do: as of today, I am offering to read any piece of minotaur erotica anyone wants to send me between now and May 1, 2026, and the best one gets $100. We'll call it the Beefhammer Prize. No charge to... (screenshot's text cuts off here). End ID]
(I'm grateful to Tumblr user nevershootamockingbird for the image ID write-up prior to "Two reblogs down", but the version of this post that I wanted to reblog went on further, so I added image IDs for the next posts too.)
There are over 41k reblogs of this at my time of reblogging, and I cannot go through them ALL. But I saw the revised cover added by several users, so here it is:
[Image ID. A new cover for "The Staff" by Wild Rabbit, still showing a man in the foreground, seen from behind, holding an Asclepius staff. In contrast to the original image, he is now wearing a shirt. Confronting him is a now-clothed/armored minotaur, which is shown holding a hammer as a weapon, and is in the middle of roaring and sending a bolt of flame towards the man, whose staff counters it with blue energy. The setting is also more dynamic, and on fire. End ID]
Gotta say, this is a much better job at hinting that this is NOT minotaur erotica (although for monsterfuckers, I think they wouldn't be surprised if the story also contained that).
Editorially, on my part, I want to say: that man is MUCH more buff than my impression of DB Cooper from other sources. But hey, who am I to judge.
I also want to point to another reblog from @galsinspace, here, which is a good argument for regarding this entire thing as purposeful engagement bait on the part of the author (even though he directly claims otherwise).
Flying Raven Sculpture
This Flying Raven sculpture, including the base, measures approximately 11 inches or 28 centimeters high, by 18 inches or 46 centimeters long, by 19 1/2 inches or 50 centimeters wide.
andulkaphoto
kianamaiart
ellievsbear
blakekathryn
