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.
Carol J Clover’s (2015) Final Girl, the female slasher protagonist who survives to the end of the movie, has become a staple of horror scholarship, providing insight into the function of gender within the genre as well as our cultural beliefs surrounding femininity. Given the attention paid to horror’s leading ladies, however, another fascinating figure has gone unexplored: the Final Boy. This project analyzes nine horror films from the 1980s with young male protagonists in order to conceptualize and critique this previously unidentified trope. Utilizing McKerrow’s (1989) critical rhetoric as a guide, this research not only provides a thorough definition of the Final Boy, but a deconstruction of how this recurring narrative reinforces harmful ideological structures including misogyny, white supremacy, ableism, and homophobia. Ultimately, it is only the boys who are white, able bodied, heterosexual, emotionally repressed, and sexually successful who are able to survive to the end of the film. In doing so, they ascend, not just to manhood, but to a messianic status, allowing them to save both themselves and others. This trope serves to naturalize the oppressive hierarchy of masculinity through who gets to live and who has to die. Identifying the figure of the Final Boy gives us a deeper understanding of one of the horror genre’s most influential eras and sheds light on the covert ways that media can reinforce damaging cultural ideas about gender.
My master’s thesis is now published and available to read for free online!
a whole bunch of gazan mutual aid projects and nonprofits. if the decision of which individual fundraiser to give to feels too daunting, or if you just want to help as many people as possible in one go, these are great initiatives to support.
care for gaza - focuses on providing food and essential supplies. donate here or here.
connecting humanity - securing internet access via donations of virtual sim cards (esims). if you can't afford a whole plan yourself, crips for esims is a communal pool that will use your donation to purchase and maintain esims
gaza soup kitchen - provides food, medical care, and classes for children. also has a gofundme
glia gaza medical support initiative - provides medical care through field clinics and tents at hospitals. donations can also be sent through their website.
ele elna elak - provides clean water, food, clothing, and shelter. they also have a gofundme
life for gaza - raising money for the gaza municipality to repair water and waste management infrastructure
taawon - partners with local civil organizations to provide food, water, medical care, shelter, and basic supplies
the sameer project - running various initiatives providing tents, medical care, and necessities. they have their own encampment project focused on sheltering families with children, sick and disabled members, or members in need of perinatal care
islamic relief worldwide's gaza emergency appeal - provides food, water, hygiene kits, medical supplies, and psychological support
baitulmaal - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, shelter, and medical supplies
gaza mutual aid fund - distributes food, hygiene products, water, and other essential supplies, including financial support. run by @/el-shab-hussein's amazing friend Mona. updates can be found on her instagram.
hygiene kits for gaza - provides hygiene supplies including menstrual products, wipes, and toothbrushes/toothpaste
anera - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, hygiene supplies, medicine, blankets and mattresses, and psychological care
palestine children's relief fund - provides supplies and support with a focus on children. also has an initiative for lebanon
dahnoun mutual aid - provides water, food, tents, baby supplies, financial support, and other necessities. updates can be found through their instagram
certainly this is not an exhaustive list, so please feel free to add on other projects or organizations that i didn't include. and as always, please take the time to donate if you can and share. it truly makes all the difference.
pal humanity initiative - provides baby supplies, menstrual products, medications, and mobile clinic visits
educational tents program - running multiple educational programs for children and offering psychosocial support
thamra - distributes fresh food and seeds for gardens, as well as repairing wells. they also have a gofundme
gaza sunbirds - paracycling team delivering a variety of essentials, including food, tents, blankets, baby supplies, and sanitation systems
the one body initiative - providing tents, sleeping supplies (blankets, mattresses, sleeping bags, etc.), food, and medicine
gaza emergency fund - purchases and builds waterproof tents and portable bathrooms, as well as distributing food, hygiene products, and medical supplies
medical aid for palestinians - provides medical and psychological care. also works in lebanon
the culture & free thought association - runs various programs including clinics, classes for children, and supply distribution. focuses on women, children, disabled people, and other marginalized groups.
hakini - provides psychological support and secures access to food, shelter, medication, and hygiene products
gaza collective - running a variety of projects including restoring bakeries, providing financial support and necessities, establishing educational programs for children, and securing supplies for traditional embroiderers
palestinian medical relief society - runs mobile clinics in gaza, the west bank, and east jerusalem
translating falasteen - partnering with the sameer project to provide food, water, medical care, essential supplies, and direct financial support. updates can be found on their instagram
roots of gaza - initiative from the al nasser charitable society. provides food, water, toiletries, tents and tent building services, cash assistance, and other necessities. also has a gogetfunding
healing our homeland - runs psychological support programming for women and children. also provides food, water, hygiene kits, and baby supplies. other initiatives featured on their website
sharek youth forum - provides food, water, hygiene kits, and psychological support as well as educational and development programs for young people
adding on this fundraiser from the arab group for the protection of nature (APN). they are doing extremely important work to support farmers and rehabilitate gaza's agricultural sector. as of june 3rd, they are about 67% of the way to their current fundraising goal - if you have funds to spare, this is a great organization to support! food sovereignty is a human right, especially as we witness deadly violence against those who have sought aid through israeli/usa-run channels.
Tumblr has been deleting a lot of Palestinian blogs in the past 24 hours. Two of my friends have had their blogs deleted. Last night Ahmed remade and had his blog deleted 30 minutes later. Today, my friend Fadel had his blog deleted.
Fundraising on tumblr is survival. When tumblr deletes the blogs of people in Gaza, that is participation in genocide. It is unconscionable.
Fadel's new blog is @fadell-aldany. Please follow him there and send him a message of encouragement. He has been on tumblr for years and has lost all of his connections.
He's in the hospital because his blood count is so low from going too long without his blood medication and proper nutrition. He desperately needs funds, and he cannot raise them if no one finds his blog. Fadel's campaign (gazavetters #197) is hosted by a friend of mine. I am texting with Fadel right now as I type this, and I personally can confirm that this new account is really him.
The minister says the situation in Cuba is "extremely tense", as a US-led blockade of oil to the country causes widespread power cuts.
Fucking sickening, heartbreaking, disgusting. Hospitals, ambulances, water pumps, so much infrastructure shut down and so many lives hurt and lost because of it, all of this at the whim of the world's most brutal empire because they can't stand to have their will resisted so close to their shores by a society that has chosen time and time again to stand proud for the dream of a better world, a world without this blood-soaked hegemony.
as someone concerned with mad liberation i see a lot of well-meaning people trying to argue against using "narcissisim" as an insult, defending it as a diagnosis and thus a category of disability. and it's just so deeply liberal and ass-backwards. narcissisim is an insult. the diagnosis is an insult. they haven't bastardized a medical condition, they've medicalized a term of abuse. they don't like you and want to hurt you because you're different and that's scary.
the term predates the medicalized disorder by thousands of years. ablism is so deeply ingrained and normalized, you aren't going to be able to disabuse people of these connotations and turn "narcissistic" into a neutral, clinical term, if there could be such a thing in psychology.
i don't oppose the prospect of like, reclaiming personality disorder labels as a praxis, but that's cripplepunk. it's operating outside the neoliberal hegemony. if you're doing it without understanding the power dynamics at play, you're gonna end up with a shallow dead-end idpol where you aren't equipped to navigate the ablism that's actually happening. you're trying to use the tools of the master (respectability and protected status.) but you can't wield them without sufficient privilege, and you've already been unpersoned.
Sooner or later leftists will have to deal with the issue that capitalism has made many people used to wanton excess and sooner or later we'll have to legit tell everyone we can't have plastic treats and luxury produce or cruises instantly available year round and it's gonna make so many people mad and call you a big meanie worse than stalin over it. It will not be popular at all but someone's gotta hold a firm no or the planet will never stop collapsing. We can't save the planet by living exactly how we do now just with a communist banner over it we have to take a loss sorry, shein product cycles shouldn't have been normalized to begin with.
The banana discourse really separated the wheat from the chaff of which "lefties" actually want a global workers revolution and which ones just want more stuff to be free
Hey all! It has been nearly a year since I've been absent from tumblr, and likewise almost a year since I have last updated you on Mona and her team's mutual aid inititatives. In that time, Mona's efforts have managed to keep entire communities of displaced people alive in the refugee encampments in Ghazzah, including through the distribution of staple foods, fresh fruits and vegetables, cooked meals, clean children's clothing, diapers, baby formula, and so much more. Please continue to support Mona's efforts through the new link on Chuffed. Remember! Every single dollar counts!!! Chuffed donation link.
For more information, please consult her Instagram!
If you also have more to spare, please help Mona support her sister and niece who have been displaced 6 times over the course of the accelerated genocide.
None of this is possible without Mona and her family's diligence and work. If you would like to send her a thank you note or well wishes, please include it in the replies to this post, in your tags, or in the comments! She always appreciates them ♡
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