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.
do not forget the patron saint of these weeks that we celebrate ourselves proudly and openly in the streets
her name was Marsha P Johnson, and we have her to thank for so much.
remember, the first Pride was a riot, and she was one of the brave souls who endured it to help carve the path which so many of us walk today. she helped found several activist groups regarding LGBT safety and wellbeing. and she was absolutely radiant, too.
taking a moment to point out a large part of WHY we remember marsha p johnson in ways we dont remember silvia rivera
i think a lot of people think it was simply because she was an icon
she was
because she fought for a huge chunk of the rights we have today
she didduring a time at whoch she risked very serious risk of imprisonment and death even more than we face now
she did
and she did it all as a trans woman of color
she did
BUT notably silvia rivera did all of these things too!!! and they co founded a queer rights together the two of them called street transvestite action revolutionaries AKA STARs and yet marsha p is remembered and silvia died homeless and poor
so why remember marsha p specifically???
well we have someone specific to thank for our yearly reminder to remember marsha p
this dedicated to paye written by none other
than leslie feinberg
now zie wasnt solely responsible for it a lot of movement happened before and after to ensure we memorialize her right but its notable why feinberg asked we remembered her why the book was dedicated to her
"Dedicated to two trans warriors who fell in battle"
feinberg talked about this later in an interview
this is the section in question specifically
"KELLY: Can you tell us about the people who you dedicated the book to - Brandon TeenĆ” and Marsha P. Johnson?
FEINBERG: I dedicated the book to Brandon Teena, a young white male who was arrested by the pĆ³lice who later exposed to the town that he was born female and he was kidnapped and gang-raped and beaten by two men after this discovery and later stabbed to death along with two other people by these same two men. No one has yet carried out a community investigation into the role of the police in instigating this violence against Brandon Teena. But his death has served as a rallying cry not just for the trans communities but I think also for the lesbiangay bi communities and the women's movement to put a stop to this violence. Marsha P. Johnson, who I also dedicated the book to, was an African-American drag queen who was a combatant at the Stonewall Rebellion against pĆ³lice brutality and bigotry. She was found floating in the Hudson River a little more than four years ago. The police conducted an investigation that consisted of two phone calis and ruled her death a suicide. But when a people's postering campaign began in Manhattan and the Village we discovered reports that a group of young bashers had been surrounding her on the same piers near where she was found. So, I think that both of these people's lives are an indication that orĆ the one hand we don't even know how many people were killed or died under similar circumstances in the past and whose lives and deaths were rendered invisible. But Brandon Teena's and Marsha P. Johnson's deaths are a demand now for us that this cease; that we're going to put our energy into stopping this kind of violence . . . and the cover-up."*
these two trans people were not just memorable but were also killed in incredible acts of violence had their deaths barely investigated and even covered up
i hate when people make everything about trans discourse as often it just puts a wedge between us and i do not want to taint the memory of remembering the death of a most influential black trans woman by petty oppression olympics still i think its worth pointing out that as people keep trying to act as if trans men arent oppressed trans men arent in the same kinds of danger as trans women that trans men dont get killed in hate crime acts like trans women even despite the death of lucas redbeard knapp this year that we remember not only WHY we remember johnson but also i want us to remember the man whose death was first uttered in the same sentence as marsha p johnson most well known remembrance rallying cry
brandon teena a trans man whose death was incredibly violent and the end result of sexual assault that got actively covered up by police
this year i plead i beg of you all let us remember both
*notable here feinberg calls marsha p johnson a drag queen because during the era of ballroom culture when marsha was alive and the trans community was quite literally segregated drag queen/king were the terms poc used to describe themselves many went on later to identify as transgender (such as rivera did later in life) as definitions changed and grew and connotations changed and marsha p was again a co founder of street TRANSVESTITES action revolutionaries so she fully was trans
reblogging to add the image descriptions for ops image and for the clip from the interview with feinberg (text exceeded the alt id character limit)
id under the cut
[ID:
first image is of marsha p johnson a black woman in a beautiful blue dress holding a box adorned with a crown and jewels and wearing a stash that reads "stonewall"
second image is part 2 of an interview between leslie feinberg and lynden kelly a writer for a magazine called agenda
"6āagendaānovember 1996
FROM PREVIOUS PAGE
like a circle than a line with two polar opposites. Could you tell us more about that?
FEINBERG: Yes, because I'm considered masculine - I really think my gender expression is far more complex than that - but because people look at me and say "She's trying to be like a man," the assumption is that men are masculine and women are feminine so the woman who tends towards masculinity is looking like a man and a man who is feminine is trying to look like a woman. And I think that really enforces the idea that there are only two ways to be. I pointed out in Transgender Warriors that when I ride the subway in Manhattan - even in such a repressive society that regulates what people can wear and how they can express themselves by law and through violence against people who transgress it - I still see women who range from masculine to androgynous to feminine, and men who range from feminine to androgynous to masculine. And if we think of a circle and defend people's right to move on it or to incorpĆ³rate ambiguity and contradiction then we really get a wider concept of what kind of gender freedom we are fighting for.
KELLY: I understand what you're saying that your physical reality of sex and gender expression are independent characteristics, and even your sexual orientation is a third independent characteristic, and each of those varĆes along a continuum and probably for each person also varĆes over time. Is it your sense that in a "perfect world" people wouldn't feel compelled to re-sculpt their bodies physically to conform with an internal sense - that if society accepted all ranges on the continuum, would people still feel an internal discontinuity?
FEINBERG: I don't profess to have any advance knowledge of the future ... However, one of the things I looked at in Transgender Warriors is that we have been kind of given an assumption culturally through the media that transsexualism is a high-tech phenomenon. And it's true that the development of an aesthetic - which led to great advances in surgery - and the commercial synthesis of hormones made it possible for people to have greater freedom in choosing to live in the sex in which they are most identified, not the sex they were labeled by some doctor who glanced at their genitals at birth. However when I went and looked back in history I found that sex change was a very ancient and once-sacred path, and that surgical and possibly even hormonal knowledge was very much part of ancient communal cultures and that people chose sex change and went into very esteemed areas of communal life like being priestesses, spiritual leaders, as well as other roles. And so I think that when we look at those societies in which people were allowed to walk many paths and the compulsion to fit the narrow Ozzie-and-Harriet norms that we have today didn't exist, that people still did shape their bodies, surgically and I believe, probably also hormonally through knowledge of herbs and plants. And so I think that there is no reason to think that transsexuals will not always exert their right to explore their life in the body and the identity that they've chosen and that they feel deep inside but that hasn't been respected in this society. Hopefully what will change is the respect for people's transsexual paths.
KELLY: InĀ Transgender WarriorsĀ you talk a lot about these other cultures, especially communal cultures in different places in the world in different times when transgender people were respected and revered. Can you give us a couple of examples of that?
FEINBERG: Chapter Three ofĀ Transgender WarriorsĀ doesn't even have to go back 25,000 years to the Paleolithic period to find the acceptance of trans expressions in communal cultures. Chapter Three deals with native nations on the North American continent and how the many different nations had varying and diverse responses to - and paths available to - people that are far different than what we think of as what is natural for men and women. For example, gay American-Indians documented 135 of what they call alternative gender roles in that many nations on this continent. And they've even reclaimed the language that existed for those people so that it's not just man and woman but other language that existed in those societies for other sex-gender paths. The very brilliant Menominee Two-Spirit person poet, Christos, served as a kind-of editor for Chapter Three of Transgender Warriors. "Two-Spirit" may incorporate the kind of "LGBT" that we use now for this whole coalition of all these communities. Many Two-Spirit people from native nations talk to me in the book about how their own legacies from their own nations treated people who were Two-Spirit. I think it's an amazing contrast to 200 years later what colonial U.S. history says is the way it has always been, when in fact just a couple-hundred years ago it wasn't. And the Two-Spirit tradition continues today for native nations and is part of the resistance to cultural genocide as well as physical genocide.
KELLY: It's really inspiring to read those accounts, too ...
FEINBERG: It is, isn't it? It shows that the kind of history I read in school had no heart. And it didn't have me in it either!
KELLY: It really was a big click for me too when I read about how Christianity came in and squashed the existing cultures. It has never really made sense to me what was the big problem that the culture had towards people who were in that gray area. It just didn't really seem like something that people should get so uptight about but when I read about the Christians coming in and trying to especially squash the pagan rights that made it make sense for me. It made me understand the motivation behind that kind of powerful squashing.
FEINBERG: And for me I wanted to look at also: Where did those religions arise from? Why did Christianity, for example, which had begun as a religion of the urban poor who wanted to resist tyranny - why did this suddenly become tyranny, or the flag of tyranny? And one thing that was interesting for me in the research forĀ Transgender WarriorsĀ was to see how differently - when a group of people have to work together in order to survive - what a different relationship those individuals have to each other in terms of respecting the contributions of each member of the group. And how when societies began to divide into "I own it and you work for me" how much of a threat anything that represented the old free association of working together was to that new elite. I began to see how that was reflected in the religious beliefs that were imposed on people, the new laws that were imposed that said from now on you can't have same-sex love, women are not going to enjoy the status they did before, and I found that amongst the laboring classes that were being enslaved, there was a great reverence for transexpression, particularly as religious leaders. But that these religions and this reverence harkened back to an old system that threatened the new economie system. And so I thought this is like when I used to work in the factory and the strike was coming and suddenly they would come in and try to split us all up and make us fight each other. They were just doing that on a larger scale . . .
KELLY: Just divide and conquer. It's an old technique, and it works . . .
FEINBERG: Well, it works up to the point that one becomes conscious of it. And the moment you become conscious of the way you've been manipulated or pitted against other people it becomes like a bone that won't break twice in the same place.
KELLY: Which is why we as gay and lesbian people need to align ourselves with the transgender liberation movement, and the women's movement, and the African-American movement. FEINBERG: Well put, yes!
KELLY: Can you tell us about the people who you dedicated the book to - Brandon TeenĆ” and Marsha P. Johnson?
FEINBERG: I dedicated the book to Brandon Teena, a young white male who was arrested by the pĆ³lice who later exposed to the town that he was born female and he was kidnapped and gang-raped and beaten by two men after this discovery and later stabbed to death along with two other people by these same two men. No one has yet carried out a community investigation into the role of the police in instigating this violence against Brandon Teena. But his death has served as a rallying cry not just for the trans communities but I think also for the lesbiangay bi communities and the women's movement to put a stop to this violence. Marsha P. Johnson, who I also dedicated the book to, was an African-American drag queen who was a combatant at the Stonewall Rebellion against pĆ³lice brutality and bigotry. She was found floating in the Hudson River a little more than four years ago. The police conducted an investigation that consisted of two phone calis and ruled her death a suicide. But when a people's postering campaign began in Manhattan and the Village we discovered reports that a group of young bashers had been surrounding her on the same piers near where she was found. So, I think that both of these people's lives are an indication that orĆ the one hand we don't even know how many people were killed or died under similar circumstances in the past and whose lives and deaths were rendered invisible. But Brandon Teena's and Marsha P. Johnson's deaths are a demand now for us that this cease; that we're going to put our energy into stopping this kind of violence . . . and the cover-up.
KELLY: That kind of tells us something about some of the current legal issues. Are there other things, legal issues or in general, you can tell us about that are important to the trans movement?
FEINBERG : In the broadest sense, trans people have no federal protection and almost no state or local protection against discrimination on any level. So every case that is being fought out, every transsexual man or woman who is fighting for their right to transition on a job, is breaking new ground. For those of us who are gender ambiguous or transgendered or drag kings or queens or cross dressers coming up against doors that have a necessary toilet and sink inside but have a door with stick figures that have skirts or straight legs on them - that we're never going to fit into - is an issue. We can be arrested or harassed based on which we use. Not being able to check off the "m" or "f" on a passport or driver's license is another issue. If I check off female I don't feel free to travel without being in danger, but if I check off male I'm a felon. These are documents that have photos on them, why do we still have to have an "m" or an "f on them? From job discrimination to accessibility to health care that's affordable and sympathetic, the right to housing, and even the right to just walk down the street or be served in a restaurant, we're plowing up fresh ground here.
KELLY: On a quick personal note, I wanted to thank you for signing the Feminist Bookstore Pledge which pledges that feminist writers will support feminist and independent bookstores in a time when the corporate bookstores are taking over the market. The unfortunate side-effect of this is going to be that writers with progressive and groundbreaking ideas are not going to be put into print.
FEINBERG: That's right. And one of the reasons I went with Beacon Press was I went to New Words Bookstore in Boston and asked the women who run it there: "What's Beacon's commitment like to independent bookstores?" And they said, "Great!" So it was one of my considerations when publishing
LYNDEN KELLY is a co-owner of Common Language Bookstore.*
Me: "Damn people are REALLY BAD at knowing when to tag their eyestrain art/images...either that or they just don't care about photosenitive epileptic people like me. I feel really sad now."
Person: "But Allison, what if they just don't know or understand what qualifies as eyestrain and what doesn't?"
Me: "You know what? That could be a factor...While it is always better to be safe rather than sorry (so YES people should always tag eyestrain even if they're unsure if it "counts" or not) maybe you've got a point?"
Anyways! HERE'S YOUR HANDY GUIDE TO WHAT CAN COUNT AS EYESTRAIN! I'm pulling this straight from the Artfight rules page about what needs to be labeled and filtered as eyestrain because it's VERY helpful and VERY accurate! I also know not everybody has an AF account and might not always have access to this handy guide, and this is an important resource; That's why I'm sharing it here! (under the cut)
PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY!!! THIS IS ABOUT THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF OTHERS!!!
Full eyestrain AF page link
"But Allison! How were you able to screenshot that example if you're so sensitive to eyestrain?"
I dimmed the HELL out of my computer screen and looked away while taking the screenshot and did the same when putting it into this post, that's how lol. BUT YEAH ANYWAYS!!! Once again:
PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY!!! THIS IS ABOUT THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF OTHERS!!!
Saw a post about a common trans experience but that only referred to transfem in the post, and a trans guy related to it and some people immediately shut him down and accused him of making the post about himself(??), very normal reaction to shun and exclude other trans people only because they also happen to relate to what's, again, a common trans experience in a casual funny tumblr post. How is this not a miserable thing to do jesus fuckin christ
NOTICE FOR PSYCHOTIC PEOPLES LIKE ME AND THE NEW TOMODACHI LIFE: Please please pretty pretty please be careful while playing Living the Dream, esp if youāre currently unmedicated!!!
The game treats the Miis like theyāre real people and makes zero mention ever that they are not, and only ever refers to them and their POV as if they are real and you are their caretaker! While playing this honestly messed with my head pretty badly at times and made me worry a lot on if I was hurting real people/not doing enough for real people while I was playing!
I cannot imagine how much worse this would be for someone whoās unmedicated, non-dormant, or experiencing breakthrough symptoms! Do please be careful and PLEASE remember to have a way to reality check yourself while playing the game!!!
Also: If youāre not psychotic, please reblog this anyway!!! It may not seem like a big deal to you but these kinds of things are REALLY important to know for us psychotic folk in a world that is both hostile and negligent to us and our needs!!!
i think it's unfortunate that though games like the sims and the new tomodachi life are getting lauded for their lgbt representation (which is great and necessary, don't get me wrong), i haven't seen much discussion about how they severely lack any kind of disability representation. no wheelchairs or other mobility aids like canes or crutches, no amputee options. sims 4 only recently added blood glucose monitors and hearing aids in create-a-sim, but there's no gameplay functionality to go with them. i was trying to make a disabled oc in tomodachi life and i just think it sucks that lots of folks still can't make a character that truly represents them, even in 2026.
A while ago I had a very exhausting conversation with someone under one of my posts that perfectly summed up, why the TMA/TME binary is harmful. The person self-identified as TME and they have deleted their comments, probably because they realised that leaving evidence of being a bigot is not a smart idea, so I will have to paraphrase.
It started with the comment "lets not pretend like cis men are discriminated against", in the assumption that I was a trans man. I know that they assumed this because when I told them that it was "brave" to post this under the post of a cis intersex man, they became very upset and asked why I, as a cis man, was posting about the experiences of trans men.
I proceeded to tell them that I am talking about these experiences, because I have had the same or very similar experiences due to being intersex.
At that point they decided to tell me, that I was not actually cis then, but trans, and that I just didn't understand my own identity.
I had told them multiple times at that point, that I originally had been AMAB, and only reassigned AFAB to enable my IGM. This user was pretty much saying: trans means transitioning away from your AGAB, you have trans man experiences, so you are a trans man, so the doctors were actually right to reassign you AFAB. They were at this point agreeing with my abusers just because my experiences did not match their expectation of what experiences a cis man can have.
And that is the danger of TME/TMA and why it will never have any validity in my eyes. You are assuming the amount and type of oppression a person experiences based on their AGAB. And if that doesn't match up in your eyes, you assume that a) they are lying or b) that they are to stupid to understand their own identity.
They also half way implied that I no longer identified as trans because I was transphobic and not because I learned about circumstances of my birth and lifelong medical treatment that had been maliciously hidden from me.
The person later gave in and apologized, but then immediately invalidated that, by replying to another intersex user who came to my defense that "we don't get to tell them that TMA/TME is intersexist". A perisex trans person telling two intersex people what they are allowed to call intersexist. That is the state this stupid binary has left the trans community on tumblr. In the end users of this binary believe to have the authority over others experiences and identity. And that is fucking despicable.
Whatās betterā the thread is filled with people giving some good advice on how to respect a womanās boundaries and how to ask what she would be okay with, publicly. Lots of trans girls thanking him for being so patient and thoughtful with his words, and lots of people cautioning him that his purpose as a boyfriend would be to keep her safe, even from his own friends and family if need be. A+ shit right here.
hey, trans girls who are into guys? THIS is what you deserve. donāt you ever believe that you have to bend over backwards for men to like you, that you have to accept being disrespected and mistreated, that youāre something to hide or be ashamed of. youāre beautiful, youāre a fucking princess, and you deserve someone who sees that and loves you deeply and unconditionally, who will choose you over the world and fight the world for you. THIS is the kind of guy.
Anyway, hereās the original image from the California Trans March in 2004 without that transandrophobic caption that always gets shared alongside it.
And a few more images from that march supplied by the wonderful Trans Guy Archive!
every time adobe does some bullshit with their software you get motherfuckers going "now's a good time to remind everyone TintonProClips is completely free and has all the same features as After Effects" and you look it up and it's linux-only and the ui is in yucatec maya
snowghoul
discoholicmusic
vaporwave
kaledo-art
turnnoffyourmind
