Call Me Malt...

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[vicholas]

Why are people now saying "LARP" when they mean "poser". It's confusing.

[vicholas]

Everyone is always parroting The Buzzword Of The Month without actually knowing what it means or where it comes from, make it stop

[gunsandfireandshit]

Kinda like how "POV" went from "(implied first person) Point Of View" to "there is a video"

[drunkyeena]

[caffichai]

Happy Pride Year to all who celebrate!

Bluesky

[rabbitkinglune777]

drew my fursona as two rap albums I like

[drunkyeena]

Holiday was fun. Back home. Back to work and back to streaming next week, Persona 3 will be finished...

[drunkyeena]

I have been getting a lot of furry content on my instagram feed and honestly it's been great but I have now just been reminded that holy shit I don't have money to get a fursuit yet alone a head 😭

[pixelguzzler]

Alright, welp. It's come to the worst unfortunately. I am opening emergency delayed commissions, as I have to escape my house immediately (either tomorrow or in two days) :/ I will be buying plane tickets to the next state over to live with a close friend. Since I will be on the move for the next week or so and can't draw, the slots will have to be filled now and the art completed later. I hope that's okay. I appreciate anyone who can help, I really, really need it right now.

[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.

[patientno7]

my humor 2016

[patientno7]

happy 3 year anniversary of wheeze man

[rubinaito-inactive]

Finally, the original has crossed my dash.

[lavena]

@strangezeroz welcome to tumblr where the app decides when you can be gifted with the sight of og memes, you cannot look for these yourself via the search engine, you won’t find them, you have to wait to be gifted them

[miss-nerd-alert]

For those of you who might be new here, Tumblr has no algorithm, legendary memes are brought to your dash by mutuals like pet cats bringing you dead birds.

[drunkyeena]

We were winning... then metal skin happened...

[drunkyeena]

Today I decided to cook Chicken Schnitzel and Fried Gnocchi for lunch because fuck it why not...

I haven't beaten/tendered chicken in a long time, honestly a very satisfying experience to have...

And the end result...

FUCKING YUM...

[drunkyeena]

Watching people discuss social media bans and holy shit historians weren't kidding people will just give in to authoritarianism just like that...

[pixelguzzler]

I've been outed to a a member of my maga Christian family and it's only a matter of time before they all know. My "I need to move sometime in the next year" just became ideally next week in one day. I'm staying the night at a friend's place right now where I'm safer. I need to resume comms to make enough money to move but that also requires me being at home with them, so I kinda don't know what to do. Idk. I'll figure it out maybe.

[fuzzylynx]

Malt! 𓃥 Comm for @drunkyeena

[drunkyeena]

Casual Yeen listening to tunes for the Summer! Thank you @fuzzylynx for the amazing commission. Lovely to work with you!

If you're wondering what I've been listening to, Ca$ino by Baby Keem has been on loop since it dropped!!

[drunkyeena]

The protagonist will do anything for their friends... even murder I guess...

Returning to Persona 3 RELOAD on Twitch TODAY (and possibly even finishing it) - Come watch!

[drunkyeena]

These deadlock buffs are wild lmao

[passionpeachy]

The way adult fandom people hold indie online creators and cartoons to a much higher standard than their actual local politicians. You could be putting that energy into terrorizing and protesting conservatives at your town hall and actually make a good material impact on the world but instead you're background checking everything the trans woman who made the amazing digital circus has ever said

[passionpeachy]

The point isn't "stop criticizing indie artists" or "defend your favorite show under this post". I don't even watch Digital Circus and no one is above criticism. Literally every indie show is getting torn to shreds on twitter right now and I'm not saying this to defend anyone I don't know. The point is "someone who actually has the power to kill us all and get away with it deserves way more ire and accountability than a cartoonist and I expect grown adults to understand this"