Asexual, Demigirl, 21 Obsessed with Good Omens, BATIM, Skyrim, Fallout, and about eighty other different fandoms. What you get depends on which hyper fixation I have at the moment.
#Helios was declawed by his former owners so he doesn't just slap things he dislikes like most cats#he really only feels confident in hissing at them#Especially because a lot of the thing he doesn't like are bugs and those are sharp sometimes :(#Selene has figured this out and now when she hears him hiss she sprints over the kill the fuck out of the bug#Helios has learned she will do this so he'll hiss at stuff louder and louder until she hears him#A nervous old man and his emotional support homicidal maniac
tags by @gallusrostromegalus
I couldn't reblog without the tags because the context is hilarious
A Nervous Old Man (right) and his Emotional Support Violence Machine (Left)
Yes, he is more than twice her size.
Yes, he is five times her age.
Yes, he cries like a big baby until she kills Unacceptable Scary Things (earwigs) for him.
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.
I just went looking for the post on X and got a message that it didn't exist
I searched for Guri Singh and got search results showing his account existed, but when I clicked on it I got a message his account did not exist
Does anyone know if he made his account private or if he got nuked by Elon? Or do I just suck at X (because I never go there)?
I would argue that the two most perfect critiques of Harry Potter come from a pair of 4chan posts, which take opposite approaches to their critique but reach equally damning conclusions
whats my biggest fantasy? glad you asked. it's Tuesday, November 3rd 2026. the polls close and by 7:15pm it's over. Democrats now have the House 335-100 and have won all 35 seats in the Senate. at 8:30pm Donald Trump hold a press conference where at 8:32 pm he has a rage stroke and dies live on camera. JD Vance takes over the presidency for 2 months because on January 3rd 2027 the 120th Congress convenes, immediately elects Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker of the House and then impeaches Vance. The Senate convicts Vance and he is removed from office by Friday, January 8th. Jeffries takes over as president until January 20th, 2029 where President Kamala Harris is sworn in after a landslide victory winning 45 out of 50 states. Every other Republican in the Trump admin is arrested and sent to a life in prison for treason and fraud. JD Vance locks himself inside an empty Rooms to Go and sets it on fire, preferring to go out with the true love of his life - the Mipolomol Loveseat in Beige.
You're simply never going to convince me that the people who learned how to analyze, think critically, and build up skill sets so they could become genuinely informed and competent in a field and accomplish tasks independently aren't better off than the people who use generative AI as a crutch and replacement for doing anything by themselves. There's not a world where knowledge and skills are a disadvantage, so no, people really don't need to "learn how to use ChatGPT or else they'll get left behind." That's just a marketing tactic to get people to use this product sooner.
"Yeah, never worn. No, nothing happened to the baby. Well so what if it sounds ominous? We bought two pairs of shoes for the baby and got another two from the baby shower, and honestly, there's not much of a reason for a baby to be wearing shoes. Well I mean she's either in the stroller, in the bassinet, or being carried by someone, she's not being put down on the floor. I'm saying that nothing happened to the baby. The baby is fine, she's just a toddler now, the shoes wouldn't fit her. I don't think you can do that, just ask people if their baby died. No, it wasn't a miscarriage. Look, are you interested in buying the shoes or not? I'm sorry that 'never worn' filled you with a sense of melancholy, but that's really not anything to do with me."
"I quit my birth control and feel so much better, this is proof birth control is poisoning our bodies!!!" listen I am a lucky duck who tried one form of birth control and felt great but if I had to try 80 different types I would because I don't want to get fucking pregnant. if your birth control sucks try a new type!! "everyone should quit their birth control" is a bunch of conservative-crunchy bullshit
Same goes for most types of medication btw, if your antibiotics or antidepressants or or ADHD meds are making you feel like shit, tell your doctor, they'll probably prescribe an alternative.
Bro, blocking someone and then using their tag like this is, all offence, weak as fuck. Like all you had to say was, na bro I don't promote pedo protags on this here blog, because I wholly agree with the premise of your argument given contexts (i.e., writing abusive relationships to show the evils, great; writing abusive relationships to show the romance, yikes).
This response is so, so comically shitty within the context of that tag, oh my god.
Something being nasty is not a good reason to ban fiction about it.
If we accept that "something being nasty is a good reason to bad fiction about it" then we give a foot in the door for all the people who truly, genuinely believe that queer people are nasty to ban all queer literature.
This is not about defending bad people this is about defending the freedom of good people from tyranny, you moron.
I think if you take it to its logical extreme. Say, banning people from writing stories of sexual abuse. That could then be said "well ANY talk about sexual abuse is bad."
And from that, you could ban books that talk about it irl. Or books like how to recover after being abuse. If its not something to be discussed AT ALL.
The fact that I’ve seen this post in some form on my dash like 100x and each time there’s new idiots who do not get that you can’t have *some* censorship.
Either you’re for it or you aren’t.
The moment you agree that something should never, ever exist in fiction is the moment that anything can be banned.
Remember a while back how Tumblr banned a bunch of tags, including many popular innocuous ones that even people who are for censorship used and were upset about?
When censorship happens, stuff YOU like can and will be banned. That’s how it works.
Remember how a bunch of people had their accounts terminated here only last year for writing about their own sexual abuse?
When you ban “pedo” topics, say, any talk of child sexual abuse in any form, that means people can no longer write about their own experiences. It means people cannot educate others so they can learn how to protect themselves or get help from these situations.
Censorship is authoritarian. Full stop.
Even if “everyone” agrees something is “gross” and “shouldn’t exist,” that does not fucking matter.
Do you know who generally believes queer people are gross and shouldn’t exist??
The same people who are banning books left and right solely because they have queer characters or relationships.
The same people who attack and kill queer folk for simply exisiting.
This is not just some fandom matter or a case of being chronically online.
Protecting freedom of expression is essential, and if you do not get that, I don’t know what to say to you.
And the people who keep bringing up child sex abuse as a reason for censorship are doing it very specifically because everyone feels like then they HAVE to agree with the person in favor of censorship.
It’s not that there isn’t widespread societal agreement on this. It’s that they want you backed into a rhetorical corner where you feel compelled to agree with them.
Also, like, we KNOW how this shit shakes out in fandom because it's happened before.
In 2007, Livejournal capitulated to the "pedophilia and sex crimes!" cries of (hate group) Warriors 4 Innocence, and you know what communities got shut down? Slashfic communities. Sexual assault survivor support communities. Authors who'd written non-smut m/m fic even got caught up in it. It was DEVASTATING to fandom spaces. I think pretty much everyone knew at least one person whose account was literally DELETED, or were a member of a community that was wiped off the map because they were considerate enough to include topics like "sexual assault" or "BDSM" in the profiles under the badly-named category of "interests" to indicate that posts on said blogs or communities may include discussion of things like that. Even if it was for a SUPPORT group. And it was because a group of religious bigots came to LJ and said essentially "EVERYONE thinks it's gross and that it's promoting CSA, we should ban it."
Like, strikethrough and boldthrough were a large part of what propelled AO3 out of a more unfocused conversation on one person's blog about hosting a site INTENDED for fandom content, into being an actual archive and nonprofit. And it's a large part of why you won't find AO3 banning topics that you find "gross".
Censorship is authoritarian and it will ALWAYS have more collateral damage than you can imagine.
Going to add that fiction which had sexual abuse and communities which played around with it as a writing topic are the very things that protected me from irl sexual abuse when I was a teenager.
I was in a dicey situation, and realized that while my situation did not match up to any of the superficial or textbook cases mentioned in passing (if at all) through school, it matched up a LOT to what I'd learned about irl sexual abuse through works of fiction and the rhetoric of my communities. I got out of that situation and dodged what was, in retrospect, one hell of a nasty bullet.
If it hadn't been for that "nasty" fiction and those "nasty" communities, I would very likely have been abused, and subject to further violence spiraling out from that abuse.
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