Yeah I'm not even gonna pretend this has or ever will have any type of "organization". For personal fandom headcannons and oneshots follow @reddemonblondeangel. They/she pronouns, demisexual. I'm super bad at tagging bc mindless mobile scroll but if anyone needs certain tags so they can block content shoot me a message and I'll do my best
Every so often I catch a glimpse of the book drama going on over on the Insta/Threads sphere of the Internet, and it makes me so glad I’m considered too Tumblrina to sit at their tables.
What do you mean an author is railing against people using libraries/the Libby app because it’s “free” (it’s not. you as the author get money from the library purchasing the digital lending license) and meanwhile their book is on Amazon for free to try and get readers??? Hello????
I am staring directly into the camera like I’m on the Office in Librarian. Libraries are literally an author’s best friend. We get books to people they never would have known about otherwise, & create Fans out of disinterested bystanders. And! Libraries are often paying MORE for a book than the average user, at least for digital editions, because it is expected that the library will lend it to more people, so theoretically we need to pay more to compensate the authors! (This is not I think how it works in practice, it more often just benefits the digital lending company instead of the actual author but. Greed is ever thus). Also, in some countries (sadly not the US, boo hiss) authors get paid for every checkout of a book. So, you can literally get royalties on those “free” books. (Also, they’re not free, they’re paid for with tax dollars for the good of everyone). How some fool can think temporary freeness on Amazon Kindle is superior to libraries I cannot fathom. Like, how does this person even manage to function in the real world?
Anyway. Authors. Love your librarians. We love you and seek only to help you get more readers so you can write more books. We have a symbiotic relationship, each needs the other.
#I thought if you were self pubed#you basically couldn't get into the library#sounds like being mad at a club#that won't let them in
Just saw this in my notes and thought I'd reply. You can't get into libraries if you only use Amazon, but platforms like Draft2Digital, Ingram and Kobo Writing Life make it possible for self-pub authors to have their work made available to libraries across the global network.
You're sometimes more likely to get picked up by libraries if you list yourself as having a publisher, but as a self-pub author you can do that by registering as an LLC (which for me was $250 back in 2020, I don't know what it is now) and then listing the name you used as the publisher. But even that's becoming an unnecessary step with how prominent self-pub has become.
Really at this stage, this person is shooting themselves in the foot by opting to remain an Amazon exclusive author and being a twit about it on main, but that's their hill. They can die on it.
I'm starting to gain insight into why people turn into conspiracy theorists. Some topics are so totally neglected that it looks like they were intentionally and maliciously erased, instead of falling victim to arbitrary lack of interest.
I think it's a vicious cycle; when people don't know something exists, they're not curious about it. Also, people use conceptual categories to think about things, and when a topic falls between or outside of conceptual categories, it can end up totally omitted from our awareness even though it very much exists and is important.
This post is about native bamboo in the United States and the fact that miles-wide tracts of the American Southeast used to be covered in bamboo forests
@icannotgetoverbirds It already is a maddening, bizarre research hole that I have been down for the past few weeks.
Basically, I learned that we have native bamboo, that it once formed an ecosystem called the canebrake that is now critically endangered. The Southeastern USA used to be full of these bamboo thickets that could stretch for miles, but now the bamboo only exists in isolated patches
And THEN.
I realized that there is a little fragment of a canebrake literally in my neighborhood.
HI I AM NOW OBSESSED WITH THIS.
I did not realize the significance until I showed a picture to the ecologist where i work and his reaction was "Whoa! That is BIG."
Apparently extant stands of river cane are mostly just...little sparse thickety patches in forest undergrowth. This patch is about a quarter acre monotypic stand, and about ten years old.
I dive down the Research Hole(tm). Everything new I learn is wilder. Giant river cane mainly reproduces asexually. It only flowers every few decades and the entire clonal colony often dies after it flowers. Seeds often aren't viable.
It's barely been studied enough to determine its ecological significance, but there are five butterfly species and SEVEN moth species dependent on river cane. Many of these should probably be listed as endangered but there's not enough research
There's a species of CRITICALLY ENDANGERED PITCHER PLANT found in canebrakes that only still remains in TWO SPECIFIC COUNTIES IN ALABAMA
Some gardening websites list its height as "over 6 feet" "Over 10 feet" There are living stands that are 30+ feet tall, historical records of it being over 40 feet tall or taller. COLONIAL WRITINGS TALK ABOUT CANES "AS THICK AS A MAN'S THIGH."
The interval between flowering is anyone's guess, and WHY it happens when it does is also anyone's guess. Some say 40-50 years, but there are records of it blooming in as little time as 3-15 years.
It is a miracle plant for filtering pollution. It absorbs 99% of groundwater nitrate contaminants. NINETY NINE PERCENT. It is also so ridiculously useful that it was a staple of Native American material culture everywhere it grew. Baskets! Fishing poles! Beds! Flutes! Mats! Blowguns! Arrows! You name it! You can even eat the young shoots and the seeds.
I took these pictures myself. This stuff in the bottom photo is ten feet tall if it's an inch.
Arundinaria itself is not currently listed as endangered, but I'm growing more and more convinced that it should be. The reports of seeds being usually unviable could suggest very low genetic diversity. You see, it grows in clonal colonies; every cane you see in that photo is probably a clone. The Southern Illinois University research project on it identified 140 individual sites in the surrounding region where it grows.
The question is, are those sites clonal colonies? If so, that's 140 individual PLANTS.
Also, the consistent low estimates of the size Arundinaria gigantea attains (6 feet?? really??) suggests that colonies either aren't living long enough to reach mature size or aren't healthy enough to grow as big as they are supposed to. I doubt we have any clue whatsoever about how its flowers are pollinated. We need to do some research IMMEDIATELY about how much genetic diversity remains in existing populations.
Many years ago I did some (non-academic) research on native canes in the USA because I thought I remembered seeing a bamboo-like something in the wild that I'd been told was native, and I thought it might make a nice landscaping accent. But the sources I found said something like "unlike Asian bamboos, the American equivilant barely reaches the height of a man", and I went "nah, that is exactly the wrong height for anything." But if it gets 10 feet and up, I think there are a lot of people who would be VERY happy to use it as a sight barrier in public and private landscaping, and if it means putting in a bit of a wetland/rain garden, all the better. The lack of a good native equivelant to bamboo is something I have heard numerous people bemoan. Obviously it's very important to protect wild sites and expand those, but if it'd be helpful, I bet it wouldn't be hard to convince landscapers to start new patches too.
For instance, a lot of housing developments, malls, etc. seem to set aside a percentage of their land for semi-wild artificial wetlands (drainage maybe?) planted with natives, and then block the messy view with walls of arbovitae or clump bamboo from asia - perhaps it would be a better option there?
Good Lord. Arundinaria isn't just a better option, it's perfect.
I was in the canebrake near my house again this morning, and river cane is extraordinarily good at completely blocking the view of anything beyond it. It is bushier and leafier than Asian bamboos, and birds like to build nests in it. It would make a fantastic privacy barrier.
The cane near my house is around 10-12 feet tall. This species can reach 30 feet or more, but I think it needs ideal conditions or to be part of a large colony with a robust system of rhizomes or something.
It grows slowly compared to Asian bamboos, and seems to need some shade to establish, so it would take time to become a good barrier, but no worse than those stupid arborvitae.
plants like this were often intentionally cultivated in planter boxes as a form of water filtration and civil engineering by a bunch of indigenous nations.
There's a reason why Native Americans cultivated canebrakes.
Well, several reasons. As y'all may know, bamboo is stronger than any wood, and therefore it makes a fantastic building material.
The Cherokee used, and still use, river cane to make fishing poles, fish traps, arrows, frames for structures, musical instruments, mats, pipes, and absolutely gorgeous double-woven baskets that can even hold water.
This stuff is, no joke, a viable alternative to plastic for a lot of things. The seeds and shoots are also edible.
Uh I know this is out of left field but I work in plant cloning - it's a lot easier than you'd think to do for plants and it's honestly a really important conservation tool, and good for making a TON of seedlings in a short amount of time. I can look into this genus for like, cloning viability?
Hi y'all, reblogging the Canebrake Post again. It's been over a year since I fell in love with the coolest plant ever. I'm trying to bring it back but I am very small so if any of y'all have a Canebrake nearby you might wanna talk to the owners and contact some local parks and nature preserves yeah?
A lot of people are asking how to distinguish Rivercane from invasive bamboo species. This link should help you!
Here's some distinguishing traits I've observed myself:
River cane has a really full, bushy, leafy look that makes it really hard to recognize as bamboo from a distance, because the stems are harder to see. The shape of the individual cane with its branches and leaves is narrow, because the branches spread out very little, but the foliage is DENSE. It's like a plume.
River cane is stronger, denser and heavier than invasive bamboos I've seen.
River cane stems are always green all the way around, no yellow (unless the plant's been dead for a good long time)
River cane stems feel smooth like plastic to the touch. The common invasive bamboo I've seen here, when you run your hand upwards along it, the stem feels awful like sandpaper.
The biggest way to distinguish them: River cane grows 6-4 feet tall when it's in little patches, and up to 10-12 feet when it's in a large size patch (like, the size of a backyard) It is known to reach up to 15 feet tall nowadays and historical records claim heights of 30 feet or more in fertile river valleys. I really want to stress that it's RARE for it to get big. A canebrake will almost always be many times wider than it is tall (sometimes they grow in very long strips along fence rows)
The best time to look for it is in winter before things leaf out, because it's evergreen and grows in dense masses, making it easy to spot.
Some more cool stuff i've found out—River cane was a common food of bison! Earliest European settlers reported canebrakes so big that "100 bison could graze on a single canebrake." Apparently it used to make extremely high quality forage for livestock, before it was mostly destroyed.
European settlers apparently set their pigs loose in the canebrakes purposefully to destroy them, because the pigs would root up the nutritious rhizomes and kill the plant. Thinking of the relationship between Bison and Canebrakes, and the relationship between Eastern Native Americans and Canebrakes, and the relationship between Plains Native Americans and Bison...it seems like a pattern, huh?
In the case of both bison and canebrakes, they were a fundamental part of their ecosystem, and fundamental part of the indigenous cultures that used them for every material, their musical instruments, their homes, their most advanced arts, and even food (Rivercane shoots are edible just like other bamboo, and supposedly the seeds are edible too!) but European settlers purposefully destroyed the species almost completely. I can't help but wonder if there was a similar motivation.
Books that talk about Rivercane:
Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry by Sarah H. Hill talks about rivercane a LOT and gives tons of details of its uses and history.
Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction by Georgann Eubanks has a whole chapter about Rivercane.
Venerable Trees: History, Biology and Conservation in the Bluegrass is a book about Kentucky, but it talks about rivercane's importance including its relationship with bison. It's only a couple pages out of the whole book but it's still great information.
By the way, though, if you read any very early European account of Kentucky, the word "cane" is everywhere. It's just such a nondescript word it's hard to realize its significance.
On a more personal note...god, I love this plant. Here's another photo I took. When you're in the canebrake, it feels so cut off from the rest of the world; it's shaded, quiet, cool, and someone 10 yards away couldn't even see you.
i actually talked to my neighbor that I learned owns the canebrake. She had no idea what it was but she was excited to learn about it! It was a lovely conversation.
Apparently, she knew I had been down there a bunch of times and thought nothing of it. She said "Yeah I told my husband, If you see her down there, just leave her alone she's doing her thing." In the most sincere way possible, God bless this woman
She said I could transplant all I wanted, too. This was great! ...but I quickly learned how RIDICULOUSLY HARD it is to transplant from a canebrake of this size. The rhizomes are so big and tough, a shovel can hardly get through them, and unless you're at the edge of the canebrake, there's a thick mat of them going every which way. I was driving my whole weight down on this shovel and it kept just denting the rhizome and glancing off.
I did get some transplants but each one took like half an hour because I was fighting for my life!
Also, with a canebrake this size, it doesn't grow little canes that will later become bigger—it shoots up tall canes in a single season. The youngest canes, more accessible and toward the edge of the canebrake, were significantly taller than I was. I cut the top off of one transplant for ease of handling—I had a pair of hand pruners with me that were usually perfectly useful for small limbs, but I could barely get these things through the cane, it's just so strong and dense.
Someone research the material properties of this stuff ASAP. It's insanely strong.
Here is some YouTube videos that talk about river cane!
Roger Cain of Keetoowah/Western Band Cherokee shows and talks about Rivercane. This video has a BIG canebrake, the mature canes look as if they could be 15ft tall, but he says it's only a fragment of what they used to be!
Stan the River Man visits a Canebrake in Northern Kentucky. This channel only has 22 subscribers, I feel like I've discovered a rare and priceless treasure
River Cane Renaissance, Episode 1. This guy has devoted a large part of his life to studying Rivercane and now works with the eastern band Cherokee to try and bring it back.
Chattooga river conservancy video on Rivercane, haven't watched the whole thing myself but it looks really good and detailed
These videos barely have any views or comments, but y'all can help! We can spread the knowledge.
For privacy reasons, I share details online of my real world activities only reluctantly, and not very often. But don't be bamboozled into thinking I have forgotten the Canebrakes. It's exactly the opposite.
I have done a lot of networking and made a lot of contacts. I am not alone. There are other people with a story exactly like mine: first, they heard an offhanded mention of forests of American bamboo, which shattered everything they thought they knew about their environment. Next, they became crazed with fascination, searching for knowledge with insane ferocity. Then, they realized that river cane is not only a plant, it is a keystone species symbiotic with indigenous cultures for thousands of years, and it was almost destroyed due to the subjugation of its habitat and the genocide of its caretakers.
The canebrakes' devotees have been working tirelessly to compile every single scrap of information on canebrakes that exists in writing. Every record, every primary source, every historical mention, every comment and conjecture. I have been given access to some of this priceless treasure trove. The wealth of information is amazing, but even more amazing is how much is still unknown.
The history, properties, and ecological importance of the canebrakes is so much more than I imagined.
For example, the massive amounts of seeds produced by huge canebrakes in flowering events fed the passenger pigeon flocks. Likewise the Carolina parakeet was also dependent on canebrakes, and the extinct Bachman's warbler was a canebrake specialist. The destruction of canebrakes could be responsible for why these birds went extinct.
Canebrakes were absolutely fundamental to the indigenous peoples of the Southeast, providing for their every need. Food, shelter, containers, tools, music and art. The settlers foolishly thought the indigenous peoples were not "advanced" enough for metal tools, but in truth, they already had a material superior to metal. River cane by weight is stronger than steel. You can make knives and blades out of it.
I am excited for the future. It seems like momentum is building to save the river cane and bring back the canebrakes, and I am hoping to join together with all the other like-minded people to accomplish this task.
A new organization has just started in Alabama to bring back the river cane. Here is a blog post to read from a few months ago.
Was gonna go in the notes for this but screw it, I've reblogged this before because river cane is so cool
Nashville is actually reintroducing it at a couple of parks within the city limits! For example, Shelby Bottoms (where I ride bikes most days) has a bunch of smaller canebrakes dispersed along the river and they seem to be growing steadily
Also, Dr. Jon Evans, a professor at Sewanee, recently published a paper demonstrating that there are clonal stands of hill cane there that are around 1700 years old! Still a little inconclusive regarding the flowering/reproduction issue but still! I want to see that too if I can
Makes me sad every time I go to the greenways in Knoxville and am like "man you could be introducing so much river cane here, it's great"
Holy shit okay i looked it up and HOLY SHIT. Published 2 months ago.
1700 years old.
And it says A. appalachiana, (the Appalachian species of native rivercane), has actually NEVER been observed to flower, which means ???? i dont even know what the fuck that means.
THIRTY hectares. THIRTY. That's HUGE.
Does this mean that???? Most canebrakes are so small now because they're babies????
So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.
Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.
The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).
The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.
But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.
me holding a gun to a mushroom: tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit
mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters
me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face: I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU
I can’t stop thinking about Miko. Like at all. So I propose to thee:
I know we said Shane is Miko’s little brother whom she loves very dearly (read: heckles and annoys the shit out of him), but don’t you think Miko deserves a little sister? A girl HAS to have a sister!!
Yuna, who is part of a group of avid bird enthusiasts, learns about another bird who needs a new home. She’s the same species as Miko and her previous owner was also Japanese (this bird speaks Japanese!). There is no one else more perfect to take her then Yuna. So, one of Yuna’s friends from the group obviously had the great idea of mentioning this to her. Now Yuna can’t help but keep thinking about this bird who is all alone and needs a family.
“David! We have to! It’s destiny! Shane just moved out!”
(In this verse this obviously happens when Shane starting his rookie season)
So empty nesters Yuna and David acquire a second bird, Miko’s brand new little bird sister, Keiko.
Shane is not very happy when he ventures home for a long weekend and is swarmed by two birds shrieking his name.
“SHANE. SHANE. SHANE. SHANE.”
They sound practically demonic. Shane is very much NOT pleased at all. He now has to deal with double the trouble and teasing from his bird sisters.
Bird sisters. BIRD SISTERS. SISTERS. Sisters plural. He could cry.
Keiko has been learning from Miko, so now double the chaos ensues.
OH MY GOD I LOVE THIS SO MUCH
i love keiko the parrot (in multiple senses lmao) who doesn't know WHY they're screaming this word, but miko started doing it when this strange man walked through the door so sure!! she'll join!!! SHANE! SHANE! SHANE!
shane goes home to visit for the first time after they get keiko, opens the door to a wall of noise, and then just. shuts it.
he has to take a walk around the block before he's ready to try again.
shane going through personal relationship war and can't even have the initial, "hey this is ilya. i love him." conversation beCAUSE THESE LOUD ASS BIRDS!! WON'T SHUT!!! THE FUCK UP!!!!
conversation gets derailed and poor ilya is now just. standing there. (because also didn't get a warning about the birds existing because shane didn't think about it when The Everything Else was more pressing, and also he played it off for shane's sake, but i do think he was a little nervous, too, about how this would go.) because now shane has to go over and greet the birds so they'll shut the fuck up and everyone can hear each other, but miko is mad they came to House Where Shane Comes Over Often and shane didn't come over often, so she starts climbing down her perch and extending her lil foot and going "SHANE! step up? up? pretty bird step up?" and shane is trying and failing to negotiate with the fucking bird WHO CAN'T READ A ROOM.
so now he has to be holding miko, and obviously keiko doesn't want to get left out if her sister is going to be hanging out on someone, so she skitters down, too, and pulls a "up? up? step up? SHANE! step up?"
like tbh might ultimately be good for shane in the long run from the tension broken by the accidental physical comedy of having to try and come out while holding two big ass birds who are also curious about New Person and keep going, "hello" "konnichiwa. hiiiiiiiii" "hello hello pretty bird? hello" "hiiiii" at ilya, who does not. know how to help shane rn.
condo stairway scene gets me every single time bc of the way ilya lingers. the way he takes way too long to tie his shoes & adjust his jeans, the way he stands for a moment even though his cab is definitely there & the way he teases shane as he slowly lowers himself to give the sweetest, most unhurried kiss goodbye.
One of my favorite cliff headcanons is that he is supportive of Ilya and Shane, but he doesn't really get it not bc of the whole 'Shane is boring Ilya is not' propaganda everyone on the internet is saying he thinks Shane makes sense for Ilya he just doesn't understand how gay relationships work, like he understands conceptually that people are gay and Shane and ilya are in a gay relationship he understands they are in love, and they fuck, and he isn't homophobic, but he has never seen a gay couple and especially a gay couple where both parties are Masc and all his experiences with romance are based on relationships with traditional gender roles so he thinks that's how gay relationships work also so when the summer after their wedding he calls ilya up like 'bro I missed you we gotta catch up and shit' and ilya is like 'I can't leave my beautiful husband to come see your ugly mog you understand' but Shane feels bad that Ilya had to leave Marley when he moved bc he is a good friend he was at their wedding and shit and Shane lowkey wants to prove he deserves ilya to marly bc ilya doesn't have any family left that isn't his asshole brother so sveta and marly are the closest thing he has to family, and he wants them to like him and its stupid bc it's not like if Marley doesn't like him anything will change they are already married, but he just needs this one thing to work out so bad so he is like 'why don't you invite him to the cottage I am sure he'd love to spend time there and I want to get to know him better he is one of your best friends.'
So Ilya invites Marley to the cottage and Shane brings his A game he is usually a good husband naturally, but he is trying to impress Marley so he brings flowers to ilya when he gets back from grocery shopping or cooks his favorite meals or is just being generally physicality affectionate in front of cliff like kissing his forehead and holding his hand while watching a movie that type of stuff bc he knows ilya likes being shown off, and he tries to do all the little house errands that need to be done himself so ilya can spend his time with cliff catching up and eventually when Shane is out of the house for like a commercial cliff finally is like 'dude why is Hollander doing all that I thought he was the girl are you the girl?.' And ilya is like 'first we are both men so what the fuck second if you say that about my husband again I will hit you hard.' And cliff is like trying to explain himself by saying he thought all relationships had one person who was the one getting spoiled and one person who spoils them and the one getting spoiled is always the girl based on his relationship with woman and ilya is like wow he is in a prison of his own making, and he tells Shane and Shane feels so bad bc it kinda reminds him of how he thought about relationships before he realized he liked man, and he doesn't think cliff likes men, but he still wants to talk to him about it, and they end up sitting down and talking about how if he wants quote unquote princess treatment he can just ask for what he wants and needs relationships are about compromise and just bc they are men doesn't mean they don't deserve nice things also and of course cliff understands him to an extent, but he is a little stupid, so his takeaway isn't 'I should ask for what I want fuck gender roles' its 'dating a dude is like having a best friend who fucks you and still treats you like a princess, and he is like maybe I should date a dude.' But Shane isn't there for the second part of this revelation ilya is so he is like 'yes you should.' And then cliff wishes them a good rest of their vacation and leaves and then when they meet up during the season 4 months or so later cliff sees Shane on the ice, and he is like an exited puppy so he goes up to him and tells him he's got a boyfriend, and thanks him for the advice and tells him how awesome it's been and Shane is stunned for the rest of the game but after the game ilya is like supper smug bc he knew this was going to happen and is like 'cliff invited us to meet his boyfriend.' And Shane is like 'fuck it I guess this is my life now at least cliff likes me.'
Listen -- you're a good defender and your pussy is fantastic, but that's not what our team needs right now. We're trading you to Greater Boston in exchange for someone who has a car.
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.
“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
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