The Cursed Child

I am here, I am queer and I would like to expire. This blog is unhinged. Let's not be lovers, let's be ✨W O R S E✨️ https://picrew.me/share?cd=CrENXmgKfi

[just-evil]

I spy on me when ever I see I spy on me when ever I breath I spy on me her tears roll of her cheeks I will spy yet again That's the only thing my mother taught me.

I spy on me when ever I see I spy on me when ever I breath I spy on myself her hand on my thighs I will rest my head for once That the day I lived being dead

[reveredsky-deactivated20171222]

“the gay community was never racist”

shit y’all still are to this day

[andthenyoufoundmy-deactivated20]

:/

[reveredsky-deactivated20171222]

I’m glad my post got around.. ppl need to see some history

[the-haiku-bot]

I’m glad my post got

around.. ppl need to

see some history

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[the-spoopy-ghost-of-raejin99]

[justalurkr]

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.

[kauricat]

This is an excellent read.

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)?

[chaos-of-nyx]

Yup, the tweet is unavailable because the account has been suspended.

It doesn't look like Wayback Machine has a copy, either.

So I've found a few other references:

Paper: On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots

Presentation of the paper to The Turing Institute

MIT Technology Review: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says.

The Guardian Interview: ‘There was all sorts of toxic behaviour’: Timnit Gebru on her sacking by Google, AI’s dangers and big tech’s biases

DAIR Institute

[fox-bright]

do not taste plants if you don't know what they are

do not identify a fruit as edible just because it tastes sweet

hope you didn't eat any fucking seeds, bro

[fox-bright]

And today, we have this winner:

I saw the photo in my feed and went ohh, dude, no, we do not handle yellow rocks with our bare hands until we know for sure what they are. And I know that orange...

In comments, they continue:

and that's where I started cussing at the computer monitor. But someone else had got there first:

So just as a reminder, folks. If you don't know what it is, don't put it in your fucking mouth!

[fox-bright]

YOU GODDAMN STUPID MOTHERFUCKER

[lastoneout]

[paperandpencilsandskips]

[bonivers]

pushing back against oldest child stereotypes by making unwise choices and not being dependable

[trickstarbrave]

[thelaurenshippen]

[anton--rayne]

[sonhogentil]

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

OH MYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY :D

[cryptidsydario]

You understand

[powerbottombrucespringsteen]

The thing is nobody at pride is evaluating you to determine if you’re queer enough to be there because they’re too busy thinking “it’s so hot out” and “why is this lemonade 12 dollars?”

[bonbon-xo]

He works so hard! 🐸💚

[lakevida]

i love poison omelette

[the-bone-thief]

-1

[skeletor-at-the-skele-store]

-1

[sanleigh]

-1

[lakevida]

got some kick to it i tell you what

[azspot]

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”

— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

[santhipoma]

[glasshomewrecker]

Everyone should be aware of nitter.net

for any address to twitter you can replace the “x.com” with “nitter.net” and you will be able to browse as if you have an account. Lifesaver.

Similarly, imginn.com works for most Instagram addresses. I still haven’t found one for Facebook.

[stuft]

[naamahdarling]

Even better, the comments to this Twitter post were an absolute FIRESTORM of mostly dudes explaining to her that dials can’t only have 2 positions (not true) and that it wasn’t a very good piece (not true) that she was being disrespectful to her teacher (don’t care) and that it was a sign of her stupidity/rabid feminism/intellectual laziness/misandry/etc. that she couldn’t see any “middle ground.” It became, in its way, a performance piece. I was absolutely mesmerised, even as I wished I could cock-punch people through the internet.

[warpcoreejector]

Personally I hope that knob goes to 11 and stays there.

[dragonheartftherpays]

“Dials can’t have only 2 positions” is also missing the point. Even if it doesn’t have only 2 positions, the point stands that getting less of/farther away from “raging feminist” requires getting more of/closer to “complicit in my own dehumanization.” You should always be at 0% having to be complicit in your own dehumanization.

[pikadxrat]

you, reading this. you're a creature now. reblog to creature your followers

[creatures-in-posts]

this creature is you