"Eivor". Girlfag, not femboy. circa 1993. they/whatever. kill the cop in your head. Nsfw. censorship is fascism. trapped in the US. "... you, mortal beings, are the instrument by which the universe cares."
i rlly do dislike when people downplay the feral hog problem in the US bc they are genuinely a massive pest in a lot of the south since early colonizers literally set them free on purpose when they got here so they would have a familiar source of food and so they could continue the european aristocratic practice of boar-hunting 😭
like you understand that this is a LOT of fucking pigs right?
I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
Wearing the same bad suit and tugging my necktie down like "ah, my wife left me, y'know. Well they didn't leave me, they left their gender, we're still married I just don't got no wife anymore! I can't blame them though, can't blame em, after all, I'm not the man they married."
I think Rodney would appreciate transgender jokes.
"This gig, this gig such disrespect they pay peanuts they said they pay in exposure, I said that's indecent! All kinds a disrespect, I said fine I'll get paid in exposure and got a job as an adult dancer. Fired my first night, turns out they meant dance around the pole on stage not swing around the pole in my thong. I can't get any respect I tell ya."
"It's rough out there, the economy is rough. They say they only constants are death and taxes just to let you know what you got to look forward to, that's how rough it is. Just my luck, my name died and I still gotta pay taxes! No respect at all."
"They named me after my dad but he kept sayin I took after my mother. I called him up like hey dad, peer pressure really works! He was supportive though real supportive dad but even supportive y'know you get presents just like your parents' idea of what you want. I liked dinosaurs, got dinosaur underwear for a year. Now my dad sends me dinosaur stripper heels every birthday. He tries, the guy."
"I used to work at a bookstore, y'know, they got a self-help book for everything, find the right woman this, find yourself that. Look at me, I'm doing both at once. But listen, these guys all trying to sell ya self improvement. Buddy, I need self renovation. I found eight books on downstairs remodeling but lemme tell ya it wasn't what I hoped for. I can't catch a break. I got a ventriloquism book to throw my voice but it just came back. No help at all."
"My best friend grew up in Cockeysville, then he moved to Gelding Drive. I'm like buddy, you're over there livin my dream. Great pal, has a whole great polyamory thing goin y'know? He grew up and got a house with a yard and a dog and a white picket fence and a kid and two and a half wives. It's not easy bein polyamorous lemme tell ya. You go on dating sites they wanna know if you're lookin for long term short term, I'm like hey right now I'm lookin for anyone who can organize a day planner!"
"It's rough, this city is so rough you see the potholes out there? I cut a fart while I'm driving it sounds like a helicopter takin off. Even the mechanics can't help, the other day in the shop he was like hey for a grand this car could look and feel new! I asked yeah what about me and he said I don't do antiques. The doctor's no better, I went in the office like hey doc, how's it look down there. She said, gimme a minute, I never worked on one a these models before."
I'm too open, always talkin about sex and dicks, but I got no filter, see? The other day at a bar someone said "bottoms up!" so I climbed onto the pool table an asked where she wants me. That's okay, y'know, bein a slut is the best job ever. I get ta work lyin down and everyone calls me princess.
I'm clumsy too, you wouldn't believe it. I punched myself in the face tryin to open a jar of pickles. I almost died cutting myself with my own nails tryin to brush my teeth. I'm so clumsy OSHA put out a restraining order on me, I'm not allowed within 50 feet of heavy machinery. I'm so clumsy my doctors won't stop askin me if I feel safe at home.
Okay so first, I have got my full Randy Dangerfield costume together already, I just need to practice a bit and try to figure out how the open mic stuff works because it's so confusing. Second, if we can afford it, my nonbinary wife wants to do burlesque lessons together. So.
"It's tough bein trans out there, real tough. We were so poor when we came out I hadda get a hand me down gender. My wife was like, I'm not using mine anyway, have it. You know, it's a little dinged up, needs a little polish and bondo, but it's a classic. So now my agender wife don't got a gender no more. Well, there's a gender on their drivers license, but they're non-practicing."
"Comin out is tough too. I was real nervous tellin my dad because he's kinda old, conservative. I was like dad I'm a woman and he goes Yeah that happens. Didn't even pause his dinner or nothing. I'm like gee dad I was worried I'd be a disappointment or something and he's like well I wish you were a lawyer but whatever makes you happy."
"Polyamory ain't all it's cracked up to be either, I tell ya, I got girlfriends in different time zones and enough money for half a bus pass. I tried to mail myself but the prices were still ridiculous. C'mon buddy, cut me a break, I thought you charged less for small packages."
"Bein a trans woman isn't easy, lemme tell ya there's stigma bein trans, everyone judges how I look. I can't catch a break with it, I complain to my partner, they're like, I thought you liked when I stigma cock in your mouth. Like, okay no I mean I'm stigmatized and my partner they go like okay I guess we can try it in the eyes too, if you want."
"I was never that well endowed, ya know, not on my best day, and you add a few years of HRT in lemme tell ya, it's like a retractable measuring tape down there. The other day I went to my doctor like Doc, I said, whaddaya think bottom surgery's gonna cost me. He looked down and he said lemme refer you to a dermatologist for pimple removal."
Sex workers are amazing, I tell ya, I tried it but I just wasn't organized enough. I asked a friend, they said "Have you tried spreadsheets?" Are you kidding, spread sheets is where the whole thing started. Then they said, no spreadsheets on a computer but how'm I supposed to use the webcam then? It's not for me, that's okay, I guess all my sex these days is between me, my partners, and the NSA.
I was talkin to my wife the other day I said, the only way I'm getting bottom surgery is under socialism. They said why, because of redistribution of wealth? I says no, because it's redistribution of penis. They said what're ya talkin about you're already redistributin your penis to half the trans community.
Polyamory's great though, it's wonderful to have other people to lean on. One time I went in a coma. My wife was going outta her mind til she could find one of my partners to make a "girlfriend in a coma" joke with. I love em all, they're great, all my partners, they take such good care of me, they do so much they unionized about it. Now anytime we fuck I get fined by the NLRB for union busting.
Dating still ain't easy though, lemme tell ya. I said I gotta great sense of humor, I get a message telling me that's good coz I look like a joke. But no, I do alright. I just got my name changed to Twenty Bucks, now I get passed around between every trans woman on the internet.
Something else I'll tell ya about polyamory, you work three times as hard at cooking, cuz everyone's got dietary needs and you wanna feed em right, ya know? I mean people allergic to potatoes, to wheat, to onions, all of it. Once I even dated someone lactose intolerant who didn't eat cheese.
Lemme tell ya, my wife and I been together now fifteen years and I love em so much. I love my wife, they're asexual, ya know, so don't let no one tell ya you can't have a long and loving relationship if you're ace okay? I'd tell ya more but I can't cuz of the non-disclothe her agreement.
Getting organized, it ain't easy, I'd lose my dick if it weren't attached, talk about a mixed blessing. Lemme tell ya, they say a new bottom surgery dropped, sure, right through the sewer grate. Now what.
But hey, you think I'm disorganized, guys out there, they go "whose dick do I gotta suck to getta table in this place, whose dick to I gotta suck to get a parking space, whose dick-" Buddy, lemme tell ya, if you don't already know, you ain't got a prayer. These guys, I tell ya. Not me, I got free parking everywhere because I know whose dick I gotta suck.
I mean, everywhere I go, girls, y'know we sometimes go to they bathroom together, girls like us. When I sit down in the stall, girls I don't even know roll up in the stall next door and ask if I wanna good parking space. I gotta start carrying a can opener everywhere for them metal bathroom stall walls. I tell ya.
My wife is so supportive, they're always lettin me try out new material. I started transition, no problem, they loved me trying out girlfriend material. No but seriously, we're a great match, I tell ya though, I think when the judge married us he was thinkin man and wife, not straight-man and wife!
Hey, I know what you're thinkin' - "Great, another transgender comic who transitioned for clout." It's not true, I swear! I only transed my gender to beat women at bowling!
Someone should make a disco elysium spiritual successor that takes place in a maze and follows a protagonist who has to eat all the dots in the maze whilst avoiding several ghosts
Nobody calls each other “terminally online” anymore. I think that’s because everyone is terminally online now. Jobless too. And ugly as fuck. Stains all over our shirts. Stupid as well
Ok like. Imagine life without ads. You wake up, check your messages across a variety of apps, no ads. You get up and put on the tv while you prep your breakfast, no ads. Maybe you drive somewhere and switch on the radio, no ads. Maybe you drive a long distance, yet somehow, not a single billboard on your path. You pick up a newspaper or magazine to pass the time, no advertisements only articles. You turn on your game console, the home screen is just about your games, no ads to buy more. You open a streaming app, you don't pay extra for no ads, there's just no ads ever.
Think about how much of your time is spent looking at ads. "Download ublock" yeah I know, I have. But that doesn't change that the world is covered with endless advertising. Imagine never seeing that again. How much better our lives would be.
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.
theartofmadeline
ellievsbear
pixelskylines
amandla
areudirty
snowghoul
