wyoming-free until 2045. pablo360 on ao3 + also some other places but who cares about those. my dashboard is a no-pvp (reblogging the same post ten times in a row) zone.
There's straight up no such thing as an apolitical fandom space btw, there are participants in fandom who are privileged enough to not notice the politics, and there are people who, if they speak up about bad experiences in fandom, are Making It Political.
There's a choice being made when saying you want a space where people can escape from political issues and just have fun, which is between the following options:
Address the issues that prevent particularly vulnerable, marginalized people from joining the fun
Silence the ones who bring up the issues, contribute to the barriers that prevent them from participating in the fun, and squeeze them out of the space
There's a wrong choice here. It's made way too often by people who claim to be progressive.
you'll get the urge as an artist or a writer to say out loud the things you're worried about "the proportions are off" "kind of out of character" "i'm not good at summaries" "didn't get as much detail as i wanted" "i made a mistake and here's how" and that's the self-conscious part of your brain telling you "it's bad and if you don't tell them you know it's bad then they'll think you're stupid" but you've got to ignore that little voice and pretend you think it's good or else that little voice is going to ruin your life
Some of the best advice I have ever gotten was from a creative writing professor. She said never apologize for your work. Never critic it before someone else does.
Her reasoning was you are the creator. You made your work from nothing and can see all the flaws and seems and holes. But your audience may not see any of it. Maybe they will; maybe they won't. But if you TELL them about the holes and the mistakes and the problems....they will 100% see them. So don't tell them. Don't sabotage yourself just because you think you're not good enough.
this is why I exclusively refer to my homestuck x last week tonight crossover where terezi pyrope takes the place of john oliver as the greatest thing I have ever written or could ever write, which is objectively true. I am as proud of it as joseph heller is of catch-22, and am exactly as justified
#I’ll always remember Half Past Adventure : )#Great memories#I loved it so much while I read it and looked forward to updates and doodled Robins on my homework
It's not that there aren't good uses for the cornucopia of technologies being marketed as AI. It's that the bad uses so vastly outnumber them that... I want to make an inversion on "throw the baby out with the bathwater" but everything I can think of is way too dark so I'll just say the servers have already used up all the bathwater and move on
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.
you'll get the urge as an artist or a writer to say out loud the things you're worried about "the proportions are off" "kind of out of character" "i'm not good at summaries" "didn't get as much detail as i wanted" "i made a mistake and here's how" and that's the self-conscious part of your brain telling you "it's bad and if you don't tell them you know it's bad then they'll think you're stupid" but you've got to ignore that little voice and pretend you think it's good or else that little voice is going to ruin your life
Some of the best advice I have ever gotten was from a creative writing professor. She said never apologize for your work. Never critic it before someone else does.
Her reasoning was you are the creator. You made your work from nothing and can see all the flaws and seems and holes. But your audience may not see any of it. Maybe they will; maybe they won't. But if you TELL them about the holes and the mistakes and the problems....they will 100% see them. So don't tell them. Don't sabotage yourself just because you think you're not good enough.
this is why I exclusively refer to my homestuck x last week tonight crossover where terezi pyrope takes the place of john oliver as the greatest thing I have ever written or could ever write, which is objectively true. I am as proud of it as joseph heller is of catch-22, and am exactly as justified
"why can't they just be friends?" not in the homophobic sense, but in the "in your need to center romance in everything you are missing the whole point of the media in question" sense
NO DAD, air brushing unlicensed images of spongebob smoking weed on to t-shirts and selling them at a boardwalk was YOUR DREAM. i'm going to be a PROJECT MANAGER.
I actually do think we should discourage women from becoming housewives. Do not become financially dependent on a man. That's how a lot of women ended up dead over the years. A man gets violent suddenly and you have to choose between homelessness or potentially dying at his hand because you have an enormous gap in your resume and no degrees or certifications or anything that will help you pursue a career that will allow you to be financially independent. He owns your bank account. His name is probably the one on the car. Try and leave and he can report it stolen. Where will you go then?
And if you do become a housewife, take steps to protect yourself. Make sure you’re legally married, for starters; stay-at-home girlfriends have very little legal recourse to claim their partner’s assets in a breakup. Make sure your name is on the house deed/rental agreement, and have your car in your name, even if your spouse is paying for it. Have your spouse transfer money every month into an account solely in your name, so you can buy yourself things without needing permission, but also so you can save up to leave if needed.
If your spouse fights you on any of this, then don’t quit your job. The tradwife to poverty pipeline is real, and so is financial abuse.
also, many women/people experience controlling behaviour and domestic violence from their partner for the first time during pregnancy. don’t risk thinking “he’s just stressed, it’ll get better when the baby comes” because it won’t. neither you and your child will ever be safe with that man. get out as early and safely as you can
there is actually literally 0 reason you can justify for not having an epileptic safe version unless you are making a very specific kind of thing. epileptics deserve to enjoy the art you make
The strobe scene in Wake Up Dead Man was a genuinely impactful artistic choice that more than justifies itself, and epileptics deserve to be able to watch a version of that movie without it.
to be clear: I don't know who needs to hear this (/gen) but "empire" and "good" should only be in the same sentence if the latter is preceded by "overthrown for"
Do Eridians know they are different colours. I bet Grace's alien kids love finding out what colour they are. It means absolutely nothing to them but they're like :O :O
Some of them think he's making this whole 'colour' thing up to mess with them and try to catch him out by asking again on a different day to prove he's just saying random noises but he's like you are still blue buddy and they're like :O :O
Like if we met an alien species who had extra senses & they said that some humans felt spingly and some humans felt spoingly I bet we'd all want to know if we were spingly or spoingly humans
In a nonexistent perfect world, there is an 80s version of The Muppets Wizard of Oz, where the gang finally meet the wizard. And instead of “pay no mind to the man behind the curtain”- Toto knocks over a table in front of A Wizard Of Oz Muppet Head who bellows PAY NO MIND TO THE MAN BENEATH THE CAMERA!!! And it’s revealed that the wizard was Jim the whole time. And he’s like “im so sorry but i’m just an entertainer you guys are gonna have to go kill the witch on your own. you should probably hurry because there’s only 30 minutes left in the runtime.” I just think that would be funny.
I'd like to add, though, that one of the living Muppeteers is literally named Oz. Instead of the wizard being Jim all along, it can have been Frank instead and still be a pretty good joke.
{ID -
1 - tweet by @\lethe_kawaii reads:
>was serving a couple
>they were bickering 'ill pay' 'no ill pay'
>the girl tapped her card first
>card was declined
>guy smirked, tapped his card
>card was also declined
genuinely one of my favourite details about Bram Stokers Dracula that isn't really transferred to the pop culture is that vampires have irridescent eyes, they appear brown at a glance, however when light is reflected on them they seem to go red!
another thing that pop culture latched onto is this idea that you might use a wreath of garlic bulbs to ward off a vampire, however, in the book there is a popular use of garlic blossoms rather than the bulbs. i think these are a lot prettier and way more versatile for stylisation! you could have a garlic flower crown.
also like the cowboy part can we please stop omitting the fact that there is a real ass cowboy in Bram Stokers Dracula and hes from real ass Texas and he has a fucking gun and he tries to fucking shoot Dracula
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