oh. i’m sure its fine and normal that a video investigating the massive bot farm/slop channel shell company connections to the russian mafia and youtube’s own implication by allowing it to continue for profit has mysteriously vanished with no word from op.
1) the video got made 'private' I think within a few hours of being posted, but as people have provided it through the Internet Archive you can watch it there.
2) there's been no comments or videos from that channel since. Best case, they got lawyers sicced on them for defamation or something. Worst case, they got super murdered.
3) The tldr of the issue is this company has a network of accounts making shitty, often rage-bait content which seems to be watched mostly by bots, which is in total making them the most popular (collection of) accounts of YouTube. (the journalists' proof of bots presence is that a vast majority of the accounts which comment on the videos have been set up within seconds or minutes of commenting.) Part of the response to 'why' might be to make money, the other part the authors imply is to do with political influence.
Here's the part I find extra interesting:
4) You'd think that YouTube/Google itself would be invested in learning the truth of these claims - and in stopping these channels - because they're literally handing over millions of dollars every month to these people who don't have 'real' viewers.
But of course YouTube gets its money from companies paying for advertising. Depending on how YouTube measures success for those who buy advertising, they may have little to nothing to gain from nuking a channel like this. If bots mean YouTube can report to people who buy advertising that 'a million people saw your ad', do THEY care if none of those people were real? Esp if they're not themselves making the bots, they have total plausible deniablity.
I'm just speculating there, because I don't know how that reporting is done AND I don't know how companies then measure how sales are affected by the reach of a campaign. My understanding though is that companies accept something like a 2-5% conversion rate from ad views to sales? (I could be well off with those figures, it's been a while since I've looked into that sort of thing.) Has that rate changed over time? Are companies normalising paying millions of dollars for ads which aren't getting seen by anyone?
Considering this video has been taken down, I'm curious whether YouTube is on the creator's side - exposing mis-use of their platform and a parasite draining them of cash, or if they're against the creator, for exposing them to potential advertising clients for being aware of the problem and giving them, essentially, fraudulent exposure.
Oh wow so me saying "no government documentation should ever include a gender marker for any reason" has been right all along. For exactly the reason I stated when people were giving me shit for not supporting x markers on documents.
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.
oh and let's not forget that transmascvoicesproject is platforming random anons accusing transfems of being degenerate perverts and going "yikes, that's pretty messed up, i always got the feeling she was secretly a pervert anyway"
it's crazy watching this unfold in real time because it's exactly what unfolded in real time with isff.
transfem-centered blog run by a transfem gets co-opted by tmes who feel left out, get told off for the glaringly obvious transmisogyny in the co-opted version, and immediately spiral into even more full blown aggressive transmisogyny, twerfs and tmras rally to defense, copycat and parody accounts pop up everywhere, and suddenly the transfem's project is no longer about her project, the primary association is only the transmisogynistic tme bullshit.
whether for or against transmascvoicesproject, people are only talking about that now, the conversation has been completely derailed from what mouse was actually doing. and she was doing something really fucking important! i fucking hate it here no one ever learns. isff deserves better and mousidy deserves better
it took all of 3 minutes after interacting with transmascvoicesproject for me to get repeatedly sexually harassed in his notes, btw. hell of a "community" for "survivors" you got there
not even two years after the 2024 racist riots and attempted pogroms, we are back to more racist riots and attempted pogroms.
a mosque in scotland had to be put into lockdown. they are going door-to-door with hit lists and addresses in northern ireland, setting houses alight. they firebombed an imam's house in manchester. people of colour are being targeted and attacked by racist mobs in the street in broad daylight.
and instead of widespread condemnation or wall-to-wall coverage, the UK media and political establishment is filling air time talking about the "legitimate concerns" people have about "illegal migrants"
girl who's mixed up being plural with being poly: so they're all inside you at once? 😳 woah 😅
girl who's mixed up being poly with being plural: (grabbing you by the collar) HOW DID YOU GET THEM OUT HERE WITH YOU. TELL ME PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE I'M DESPERATE
like many people have said this better than me but no it IS odd that we've come to think of potatoes as so quintessentially european that their presence in historical fantasy where they're anachronistic doesn't jar. and yes people are trying to have the trappings of post-colonial europe without engaging w the icky colonialism part and yes people are neglecting to imagine what a european cuisine without potatoes would be like.
im fully in favour of 'let people have fun w their fantasy world' but is considering how the potatoes got there in the absence of colonialism not a fun exercise? maybe every year the dragon riders go on a great transatlantic potato pilgrimage
if you put potatoes in your medieval european style fantasy world people will by and large not find it jarring and accept it as a normal fantasy trope
if you put, say, black people in your medieval european style fantasy world a whole demographic of people will get very angry and accuse you of breaking their immersion
this is in spite of the fact that black people were a lot more common in medieval europe than potatoes.
Did a school visit today and asked a group of 8th graders if they could define the term "contemporary art" for me [for context, I work at a contemporary art museum], and one of them said "Is it art that's made with contempt?"
And unfortunately that's the funniest thing a student has ever said to me in 10 years of teaching
I do think the ability to emoji-react is a net win for human communication. not only does it give you an outlet for 'I see and acknowledge this but don't have a verbal response' but it also adds a pleasing alethiometer element to things
my coworker announces that he's off to the dentist. someone reacts with a tooth emoji. is this a statement of dentist solidarity? a wish for my coworker to return with more (or fewer?) teeth than he set out with? simple word association? who can say
I am slowly losing my mind over the shift towards video as the default media format.
I do not find this to be an efficient way to absorb information. I am bored and distracted by the time the largely unnecessary introduction is over. I can't use ctrl+f to find the specific information I'm looking for. If there are instructions to follow, I don't want to have to constantly pause and back up to the part I need.
