Geena | 30s | Blackity-Black | Sagittarius | Writer | Commie | Professional Heel. | Formerly everyleaffallstoosoon and vemeer-mark-iv | writing blog: @geenawrites
Personal blog for my personal likes and interests. I rarely tag things anymore, so check out my archive for old tags to use for navigation. Not a spoiler-free zone. This blog contains blood, gore, and body horror. Not suitable for anyone under eighteen. Donât follow me if you arenât 18+. Thanks for visiting. Bye.
An End Has a Start (Monsterverse, Godzilla: King of the Monsters)
(1) All Sparks [1/1] - PG-13 - AU. Post-KOTM. The Russell Family (doesn't) deal with the aftermath of Skull Island and the Hollow Earth.
(2) Cosmos - [4/4] - G - AU. Post-KOTM. "The COSMOS is a call for aid, not control. The very idea means giving up on the world of human supremacy."
(3) A Start - [1/1] - PG - Madison wants to reconnect with her father. Mark tries communicating, too. Sort've. ONE SHOT.
(4) An End - [12/15] - M - A Titan trapped in the Colorado mountains threatens to take what little family Madison has left, and Godzilla's not around to help.
( from sprinkler splashes )âI have gone undercover before, Ferus,â Siri said. ( to fireplace ashes )âThe Council decided that it was the only way to infiltrate a vast space pirating operation.â ( I gave my blood )âI had to pretend to leave the Order.â ( sweat ) âIt was difficult.â ( and tears )âEvery Jedi thought I had turned to the dark side, even Obi-Wan.â (for this )
   ( youâre on your own, kid, you alway have been. )
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.
"Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you canât eat money."
Paul de Pointe du Lac was someone Louis "loved more than anyone on earth" and was never really allowed to grieve for on account of being hunted by Lestat. As a consequence of that, he loses the ties and love of his sister, Grace, who buries the memory of him before leaving NOLA (IIRC).
So, it makes sense that, in their journey to absolve Lestat of all wrongdoing against Louis, perhaps to shake the ever persistent audience suspicion that he may have had a hand in his death, they would drag Paul from the grave. Drag him out and get him to thank Lestat for loving his brother how "he needed to be loved".
It's quite the death knell, turning Paul into someone sympathetic to Lestat, where his last words were telling his brother, "Do not trust that man". And had the opposite effect (lmao), apparently. Because now I'm seeing people say, "Damn, he did kill Louis's brother!"
With Loumand (as it is referred) there were a lot of ways to handle what is, effectively, the fallout of yet another abusive relationship. But the writers have shown time and again, they see Louis committing normal relationship woes (arguing, questioning, being emotionally distant with his partners) as equal to abusive behavior.
And yet, none of it is comparable to what the writers had Armand do (i.e. the murder of his daughter, Claudia, the mind manipulation) and then do again to Louis (beheading him, torturing Claudia's doppelganger, branding him). In the end, everything comes back to that sham trial/lynching.
So, naturally they avoid it. And for them to go in the direction they did - again, largely to avoid making Lestat pay the piper to anybody - is not only predictable (at this point), but also feels like the writer's malice expressed to its fullest intent.
And in the end, after stripping the apparent nuances in Louis's past role working the red light district (the politics that therein with with regard to his class standing, and even the relationships he had with those minor sex worker characters), the writers suggests Louis's former occupation puts him on level with Marius who groomed and abused Armand. Marius, who has more ties to Lestat, and how Lestat tended to talk about Armand and his abuse.
For the writers, Louis did not meet a specific criteria of talking to Armand about his past or loving him, "Louis used him" and this is Armand getting his well earned lick-back. The Loumand scream fest from 2x05 is a greater sin than Armand torturing him not once, but twice, and doing it with a live audience in mind.
And then they have Armand brand him like an enslaved negro, which cozies up nicely with Claudia's ghost calling him a biologically determined slave and saying Lestat is actually her favorite father.
Of the other things I've read about TVL, the showrunners saying, that the previous two seasons were about "Louis navel gazing" (this specific term being used to say "selfish" or "narcissistic") vs. trying to reckon with his past and the relationships therein, certainly says a lot.
A lot, a lot, a lot.
TL;DR
hole-lee-shiiit my dudes, white supremacy levels over nine-thousand.
