even nothing has its consequences

they/she. none gender with left queer. perpetual problem-haver and compulsive problem-solver.

[oldbutchdanielmolloy]

daily affirmations: i am allowed to be weird on tumblr. i am allowed to post stuff that makes me seem crazy because it's fun to do that. no one is watching me panopticon style they are just following me normalstyle. i am allowed to be weird on tumblr.

[should-be-sleeping]

[jadeandquartzes]

[id: a gif of brennan lee mulligan in battle for beyond, saying "you don't have to respect me. in fact, I'd prefer you didn't." end id.]

[zoesupreme]

no for real like sit over there and drink your little beverage and stay tf out of the way let me cook

[luthvian]

People who are mad about this don't understand the concept of parallel play and also probably hate cats and think that cats are all mean and aggressive.

[ahmnorhein-zkn]

Repost, now do your honors.

[jkl-fff]

Trans people just existing is no more sexual than when cis people just exist.

[anonajn]

relentlessly funny to me when people treat a relationship between someone in their 30s and someone in their 40s as "age difference". bro i cannot tell you which of my friends are 34 and which are 44. i can probably tell you which ones aren't 30 yet, but it's probable some of them are 50 now and i didn't notice. if you're over 30 and don't have kids, it's kinda all one age until you can collect social security.

[manuciruja]

awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?

[marisatomay]

Happy Pride

[sociallyunacceptableart4]

This was my art school’s water fountain. Drink from them wolf tiddies

[mando-lore]

Assignment misunderstood. I have now built a city.

[mando-lore]

[mando-lore]

Give it a day

[alexaloraetheris]

[timemachineyeah]

Spirit Animal is racist.

Patronus was invented by a transphobe.

I think it’s time we all suck it up and say what we mean: fursona.

[xxlovelynovaxx-deactivated20241]

I know this is a jokey post (rip OPs notes) but a fursona is typically an animal REPRESENTATION of YOURSELF, not an external animal that is strongly meaningful to you and your life/journey.

I've seen daemon and familiar proposed, but to keep in line with the cursedness of the original post, may I suggest: spiritual tamagotchi

[timemachineyeah]

do you have any idea how refreshing it is to see a correction/suggestion to this post that actually understands the assignment

[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.

[irispurpurea]

This is the paper. It's excellent, highly recommend reading it.

I remember reading about Gebru's firing but I had no idea this was the paper she was fired over.

[faulty-heat-vents]

ooc meme time, enjoy the one vex-meme I actually put effort into

transcript below readmore

—READMORE BYPASSED—

What does it mean to be a [TECHNOPHILE] pilot?

To look into the darkness between the stars-

to find a thread-

to call out to the horror and invite it in

Did you find it? Did it find you?

Is there a difference? Does it matter?

It will rewrite reality for you because you gave it reality

There is a bond here-

in every form-

in every degree of benevolence.

The acceptance of something so alien to you that it stretches every HUMAN definition of life.

and despite the void between your hearts,

there is LOVE.

[vexwerewolf]

BT-7274 is not, in Lancer terms, a comp/con. He's clearly capable of operating without Jack's instruction, synthesizing new information, learning and deduction, improvising strategies and making value judgements, none of which comp/cons are usually able to do.

Mechanically speaking, he would be better represented by an NHP, but NHPs are also their own weird thing that aren't actually AIs by a technical definition.

[a-rebellious-waffle]

What about an unshackled NHP? Does that count as an AI?

[vexwerewolf]

It's very complicated as to whether any NHP is an AI, especially unshackled ones.

Lancer uses NHPs pretty much exactly how almost every other sci-fi setting uses AI. For that matter, sci-fi in general uses "Artificial Intelligence" as synonymous with "Machine Sentience" when technically, any intelligent being created by humans through a non-natural process is AI.

Freefall has Florence Ambrose. She's a Bowman's Wolf, a species of red wolves with a specific neurogenetic template applied. Despite being 100% biological, she is - legally speaking - an AI.

JC Denton from Deus Ex is a clone of his brother Paul. Technically speaking, he's an artificial intelligence.

We generally understand "artificial intelligence" to mean something like Cortana from Halo, Claptrap from Borderlands or, indeed, BT-7274 from Titanfall: an intelligent machine. It may or may not have a "body" capable of interacting with the physical world, but it's a computer of some description that thinks for itself.

So what are NHPs?

Well...

... it's complicated.

NHP stands for "Non-Human Person," which is actually an even broader and fraught term than "Artificial Intelligence," and is again used to refer to a very specific type of being despite it notionally describing literally all sentient non-human life - indeed, it's pointed out in both the core rulebook and No Room For A Wallflower that the Egregorians, as non-human sentients, are technically NHPs.

But "NHP" specifically refers to Deimos Entities or Deimosians, which are... something. They first manifested as errant behaviours in subalterns (robots) that suggested self-awareness, but they weren't "awakened" machine code - they were a form of non-corporeal, higher-dimensional entity that could only manifest through human technology.

A popular description of NHPs on PilotNET is "you trapped a hurricane in a jar, painted a smiley face on the glass, and talk to the smiley face. It's still a hurricane." NHPs usually manifest as holograms or subaltern frames, but that's not the NHP. That's the interface. The NHP itself is an entity contained inside the folded space of a casket, the Lancer equivalent to an "AI core."

Most notably, the containment device also restricts them to a human perspective - they are locked into a human understanding of temporal progression and spatial relationships, and to behavior that aligns with human wants and needs. When NHPs "cascade," breaking containment, they don't lose their intelligence or sentience - they begin to lose their human perspective. They start to act in ways that are incomprehensible or dangerous to humans, but they are still driven my motivations that seem reasonable to them.

Are NHPs artificial intelligence? Not... exactly. The entities that NHPs exist as in their unmodified state seem to be "natural," or at the very least, humans didn't create them. The perspective through which almost all of humanity interacts with them is artificial, and the state in which they are forced exist in order to do this certainly isn't natural.

[squeakitties]

following weird horny furries who are into shit like pooltoys and transformation and stuff is enrichment. the vitamins and minerals of posting

[squeakitties]

[twinkenjoyer-deactivated2023083]

once you get over your ass and realise you will never get some people and that’s ok you are basically immune to right wing fearmongering. otherkin? none of my fucking business

[stevishabitat]

[strix-returns]

Reblog a kink blog to build herd immunity

[3000s]

sometimes older people get annoyed when i say "no problem" instead of "you're welcome" but the truth is it's literally not a problem

[3000s]

and sometimes you're not welcome

[creature-adjacent]

Carnivorous plants doin this is so funny to me

They don't wanna eat their pollinators :(

[questionablepastries]

[fadingembers]

As a kid, I was really upset that Bill Watterson wouldn't license Calvin & Hobbes so I could have plushies or so there would be a Saturday morning cartoon. Now, I realize his resistance is the reason we don't have a Calvin & Hobbes DreamWorks movie starring Chris Pratt.

[doctorjanedee]

Everybody say thank you to Our Lord of Artistic Integrity, Bill Watterson.

[micro-usb-deactivated20230625]

[disast3rtransp0rt]

As someone who took etiquette lessons, politeness is an incredibly effective tool for disarming bigots. You can either force them to reconsider their words/actions by directly and calmly confronting their behavior (by using the rules of society in your favor), or you can dip entirely while they appear to be in the wrong.

Both options are great.

Because the thing is, when bigots pick fights, they are 100% counting on you to get louder than them. Or meaner. They want you to react emotionally and provide fodder for their 'You're Too Emotionally Immature To Understand' cannon.

What they aren't expecting you to do is say one of the following phrases in a polite, concerned tone:

Are you okay?

That's not the kind of language I was raised to use with others.

Do you need a moment to think on why that wasn't acceptable?

This is no way to engage in intelligent conversation. Please try that again in a kinder tone if you'd like this to continue. (I really like this one because it lets you turn their public-shame rhetoric around)

For those of you who'd are spiteful and/or dealing with Fundamentalists/Evangelicals/generally shitty Christians:

What's happening in your life to cause you this much anger? I can't imagine hurting so badly that I need to hurt other people.

Who taught you it was acceptable to treat other people this way? Certainly not the Jesus I remember.

Whatever happened to 'judge not lest ye be judged'?

If I talked like that in front of my parents or grandparents I would be ashamed.

I think there's something you need to pray on before we try and have this conversation.

And my all time favorite:

"It sounds to me like there are some seriously dark and angry forces at work in your heart."

(Nothing stops a Christian bigot in their tracks faster than implying the Devil is causing their bigotry. But you MUST be calm, polite, and gentle with your tone and wording. It is absolutely fair to twist the rules and play them at their own game, but you gotta play hard.)

TLDR: It's much faster to use etiquette, politeness, and rhetoric reversal when eviscerating idiots online and in person, because they aren't expecting you to weaponize their behaviors back in their direction. Don't get angry, get spitefully polite! :)

[themythicalcodfish]

I once witnessed a very soft-spoken young Southern man take a hateful older woman’s hands gently in his and say “Sister, I am so sorry that the Devil has carved a home for hatred in your heart. I’ll pray for you.”

It was glorious.

[1863-project]

This works with all sorts of inappropriate behavior. I work as the archivist in a public library, so I end up on the reference desk a lot, and sometimes patrons will say or do things that aren't exactly appropriate. When patrons try to hit on me, I put on a teacher voice and calmly ask, "Is that an appropriate question to ask someone at work?" and it shuts them down immediately.

This sort of thing always does the trick.

[mosshroomish]

can i please see a fat woman wearing it. yes, i know your sizes go all the way up to 5x. but can i please see a fat woman wearing it. yes, i heard you're woman-owned. can i please see a fat woman wearing it though. yes, i understand you donate 50% of proceeds to this charity. i still do not see a fat woman wearing it. can i please see a fat woman wearing it.