Human-shaped, simian-obsessed, robot-fighting, pirate-hearted, storytelling junkie, Mark A. Rayner is an award-winning writer of satirical & speculative fiction. RoboPope not included. Mastedon: @[email protected]
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.
running low on bronze, which city should i sack 🤔?
ugarit
ugarit
ugarit
Voting ended onJun 9
👤 ugarits-finest-merchant-deactivated11770102
man, fuck you guys
#y'all hear anything? #...must've been the wind
🔁 wenamun-of-waset
☀️ wenamun-of-waset
cities these days just don’t respect the will of Amun like they used to… back in the days of Pharaoh people used to ACTUALLY pay the gods some respect!!
🌲 byblosiophile
for the last time, we are not giving you free lumber
☀️ wenamun-of-waset
but i hauveb no money 🥺
#i only wish to carry out the will of amun :( #its not my fault i was robbed in a tjeker town :(
🔁 uhhaziti-up-top
👩 ankhesenamun1348 Follow
I am a widowed and marriageable Queen 👸!! I am looking for a prince 👑 that’s ready to be tamed like a wild beast 🐺 tamed to be a pet 🐶 and never look back on the past life…
👤 4thbestprinceofhatti-deactivated1324051
o shit fr?
🛡️ uhhaziti-up-top
they fuckin got his ass LMAO
#yet another L from the land of hatti #bet egypt gave him plague too
🔁 kaškan-nicely-here
🐎 kaškan-nicely-here Follow
at the store 🤪 anyone want anything?
⚔️ you-wanna-piyame
mmm get me some of that sweet sweet iron 🤤
🌞 the-great-king-of-hatti
whgat the fuck. is that my house???
🐎 kaškan-nicely-here
move your feet, lose your seat 😌❤️
#not our fault you went to invade syria again lol #no takebacksies
🔁 littletirynthianpig
⚒️ alashiyanbronzeboiler
boat :)
#alashiya please lock in... my city is running out of bronze :(
🔁 eteocretan-eccentric
👤 cretan-cowboy-deactivated1450082
who up leapin they bulls
⛰️eteocretan-eccentric
never forget what the ahhiyawa took from us 😖
#they even stole our perfectly good syllabary
🔁 littletirynthianpig
🐷 littletirynthianpig
was anyone going to tell me there was more land to the west or was i supposed to just sail out there myself
🐷 littletirynthianpig
anyways look at my little hesperian piggy!!! #mylittlepiggy
#kind of a hassle to get him here but oh well #all in the name of major street cred
🔁 alashiyanbronzeboiler
🚣 ahhiyawan-adventurer Follow
starting to think this whole syllabary thing is a scam, we should ◊◊◠◡◉◡◠◊◊
🚣 lukka-this-boat
so true! i think △▼△▼◎▼△▼△
⚒️ alashiyanbronzeboiler
#mom come pick me up the aegean is actin weird again
🔁 wenamun-of-waset
🌊 tjekerbythehand Follow
can everyone quit harassing tjeker posters on here over that egyptian guy whining about the “will of amun”… OP literally stole 30 deben from us last week 🙄
☀️ wenamun-of-waset
no + its all in your head + all further communications must go thru my lawyer (the beautiful cypriot hostess who has granted me safe harbor)
#gods forbid a man carry out the will of amun-re #smh
🔁 sherden-my-herden
🌊 tjekerbythehand Follow
“oh no, the sea peoples are taking all our stuff!!” weak shit. the solution is simple: if you can’t beat em, join em. take to the sea ❤️
🌲 byblosiophile
instructions unclear, i am now in carthage
⛵️sherden-my-herden
what the fuck is a carthage
#is that some sort of new plague? do you have a salt deficiency
⚒️ alashiyanbronzeboiler
hey everyone, i’m here to announce that bronze ingot commissions are now CLOSED. i was dicking around in my forge the other day and found something way cooler & cheaper. more to come soon!!!
In 1989-1990, I traveled around the world solo. That's not to say I didn't make traveling companions as I went, but there were long periods -- sometimes weeks -- when I was truly alone.
And for about six months of it, I couldn't remember this amazing woman's name. Every time I'd meet people who spoke English, I'd ask them things like: "Hey did you ever see the Jerk? Who played opposite Steve Martin in that?" How about Pennies from Heaven? Have you seen that movie? Silent Movie.
Maybe I was just unlucky in the people I happened to meet, but nobody could ever answer this.
I know. For those of you who have grown up with the Internet this is just an insane dilemma. But it happened. When this happens to me now, I've learned the best thing to do is just relax and occupy my mind with something else. Then my subconscious provides the name. Long after the topic has changed in conversation. Sometimes I pull out the extra-brain and get the answer right away. (Not that often in conversation, tbh. Seems rude.)
This went on for six months. Seriously. I just couldn't remember her name. I can't even tell you why she came up in conversation in the first instance -- probably we were talking about The Jerk -- but who knows?
The lacuna became a daily reminder of my own frailty.
Coda: This epic dry ended in Ireland after a long walk along the coastline of County Clare. I was in Galway, staying at a hostel, chatting with a lovely French woman about the walk, when my brain suddenly provided what I had been seeking in vain for so long: "Bernadette Peters!" I blurted. Completely unrelated to our conversation. I started laughing. I was so relieved. I almost cried. And no, the French woman and I did not become traveling companions.
25 years ago an unknown Chinese protester stood in front of a tank in defiance of the government. No one knows the identity of the man but he was given the nick name “Tank Man”. This is one of the most iconic photographs of the century.
It’s actually been 27 years now since the incident known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred.
The picture above, famously referred to as “The Tank Man” was actually taken on June 5, the day after the massacre.
(Which honestly makes him the one of the bravest person, to go back and stand up to a regime after such a terrible event transpired)
So what happened?
I’m gonna give the TL;DR version:
April 15, 1989. Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party Chief dies.
Many people, including workers, laborer, students and some officials come to mourn. You see, those protestors were originally there to mourn, not protest.
Time passed and there were some hunger strikes, and protests, and a call for accountability and reform from the government.
Eventually, things went south, because the communist party doesn’t have time to deal with these sorts of “demands” and grievances.
Keep in mind, the people wanted not the end of the Communist Party, but for the party to stop with the official corruption, rule of law, and the gross monopoly of information and power.
Incidentally, China still suffers from all of these SAME problems to this day…
June 3, 1989. The massacre started at night to disperse the crowd. Many were shot, wounded, and killed.
June 4, 1989. Some of the parents of the protestors who never came home went looking for them. It was still total mayhem.
June 5, 1989. The iconic image of the tank man was taken. To this day, no one knows what became of this person.
Content Warning for video: blood
“Tell the world…”
I cannot stress how important it is that people remember and know about this event.
Do you know how China responded? With lies and censorship.
Even now, in 2016, we do not have an official death toll on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Chinese government doesn’t even acknowledge the event as a “massacre”. And they weaves these cover stories of “counter revolutionaries trying to overthrow the government”. Therefore, the violence was necessary to ~protect~ the people. (Or some bullshit like that)
The amount of lying and censorship in China is, quite frankly, scary amazing.
Tumblr, which somehow managed to fly under their radar, found itself being blocked in that country.
After all, tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.
And those who remember the incident in China?
…………well, you tell me.
Please at least REMEMBER this tragedy. Untold innocent lives were lost, and a nation has been fed a lie for almost three decades now from their oppressive af regime.
Tiananmen Square happened when I was seven, and let’s just say children have a really interesting way of interpreting information.
I just remember thinking it was a happy event, because all these people were out on the street, and at first the army were interacting with these people. And it almost looked like a festival because people were singing and talking, and hopeful. And then tv coverage for the events got cut off.
The blocking of the live coverage had all the adults anxious, nobody said anything for ages, I just remember my grandmother saying, “Just be glad your father isn’t in China, now.”
And that stuck with me to this day. Because yeah, if dad had been in China then he would have been in Beijing studying, he would have been on those streets with those other students.
It was the first time I knew that something horrible had happened to all those people I saw on the television. I don’t even remember how I knew that the army must have shot at the civilians, I just knew. Because when you grow up in China, especially in the 80s you knew there were things you don’t say, that you can’t express in a public forum, because that can get you and your family in trouble. You just knew, and it didn’t fucking matter if your were a child or an adult.
To this day I don’t remember how I found out what happened in Tiananmen Square, because the news covered it up, but people found out. My grandparents knew, my uncles and aunts knew. Extended family visited my grandparents, I remember people telling my mother not to mention my father’s name because my father was a Chinese Beijing University graduate, who had gone overseas. Because there were people who died in the protests that my dad knew.
And it was all just so frightening because nobody was telling me directly what was happening, but I just knew that all the people on the streets was probably dead.
Looking back on it, Tiananmen Square instilled in a me a life long distrust of governments, but especially the Chinese government. I’m ethnically Chinese but I never want to return to China, not even for a holiday, and this has been my attitude even before Xi Jinping took power. Because Tiananmen Square was a peaceful protest that ended up with the army using heavy artillery against their own people. How can you trust in a system, in a government like that? Because if my dad had delayed further studies overseas by two years he would have been one of those students, one of those fucking kids on the streets that would have died.
And you know, when the Umbrella movement was happening in Hong Kong I was deeply panicked and just anxious because I kept on thinking all those people, all those kids are going to be killed. And when that didn’t happen it was such a relief.
When I found out years later that Chinese people a few years younger than me didn’t know what happened in Tiananmen Square I was so fucking angry. I can’t even articulate the rage and the sheer tiredness of it all.
Dad and I talked about Tiananmen Square a few times through the years, broadly, politically, and at times with sheer rage on dad’s part. I don’t even know what I wanted to say, but just fuck this fucking regime.
I was In Hong Kong when Tiananamen Square Massacre happened. Hong Kong was still a British colony then and had full freedom of press, and its reporters were there recording live footage while trying to stay as long as possible when tanks rolled in and shots were fired, when students lay in blood and their fellow students piled the injured bodies on those wooden plank carts to get them to the hospitals, while asking the Hong Kongers who were there to support the movement to please remember that night and spread the story of the massacre far and wide, because they already knew they would be silenced, if not imprisoned or murdered.
That night, and in the upcoming months, Hong Kong was in perpetual tears, and in literal shock.
Hong Kongers were mostly Chinese, just south of the border with people traveling back and forth. It also shared a language, and so HKers could follow the whole movement and hear news that western media had little access to without the distorting effect of translations. And they followed very closely, because by then, Hong Kong was already scheduled to be returned to China in 8 years time. How the Chinese government dealt with the movement would be a sign of how it’d treat dissent, how it’d treat people who’re used to the idea and practice of freedom.
What they saw was deadly. Ugly. It broke the hearts of millions of Hong Kongers who trusted that The Chinese Government had left its Great Leap Forward, its Cultural Revolution days behind. Those who could leave, left. Everyday the airport was filled with families about to be torn apart, who decided to trade the life they had in one of the richest, most vibrant and freest city at the time with the unknown, just so their own children would have the freedom to speak their minds, to have a higher education and not to be seen as the enemy of the state because higher education always led to independent thinking, to questioning, to asking for a better government as those university students in Beijing in the spring and summer of 1989 did.
The heartbreak and fear was almost palpable in its intensity. Most HKers were refugees from China or 1st generation of them. Unlike the HK youths now protesting who are more generations removed, they felt much more connected to the people in China. They still saw themselves as Chinese, like those students in Beijing. They mourned. They cried and cried and cried. They wore black or white everyday like it was the death of their closest relatives. TV stations played these Tiananmen Square clips all day. I can still play many of them out of my memory, can still recite what the students and government officials said (for example, they didn’t use tear gas because they only had three), the songs played — I know every word of China’s national anthem for that reason; the students were singing it. They were patriotic. They demanded reforms because they wanted their country to do better. 8964 was and still is, etched in my psyche. It is just one of the long list of atrocities this government has done against its people, but this one, I was close enough to feel it.
China censored the June 4th Massacre quickly and thoroughly — if you believe China has censored queer material, for example, I’d say this — the extent of that censorship is not even close to what a true China censorship does. A true Chinese censorship is you can’t find the info, or a hint of that info anywhere. You can’t talk about it in a roundabout away. You can’t change some elements of time/place/person and pretend it’s fictional. It would literally ban the numbers 8,9,6,4 from search results, even though the searcher may really be just be interested in the numbers themselves. Whoever speaks of it may be sent to the police station for a “discussion”; their family would be sent, if the speaker is outside China; the speaker may be arrested, and may never be seen again.
The western worlds pretended to be enraged about the massacre for a while and soon forgot about it, kept its diplomatic relations with China and did business with its government as usual. UK returned Hong Kong to China as scheduled, on July 1st, 1997. The city has been the only place that insisted on the mourning the victims and had done so insistently, consistently for 30 years, holding a yearly candlelight vigil in Victoria Park until this year, when because of the protests, the Chinese government decided to not even pretend to honour the international treaty they signed that promised HK its freedom until 2047 anymore. They shut the vigil down in the name of the pandemic (there were <10 cases/day then). Still, some people risked being arrested to go to Victoria park and lit their candles.
The Chinese government fears HKers for this reason. They are outside their iron curtain / firewall but have always been close enough geographically, culturally and ethnically to know and more so, to care. And there’s nothing more a government like China’s fear than people who insist on remembering the truth. With the National Security Law in place in Hong Kong now, probably the yearly vigils can’t continue. To understand how insane that law is, by writing this reblog, by saying things that make you dislike the Chinese government, I’m already in violation of its Article 38. It doesn’t matter I’m writing it in a foreign country. It doesn’t matter I’m a foreign citizen. That law includes everyone on Earth.
Yes, that includes you. And you. And you. And you. They can arrest you for trying to overthrow the Chinese government if you pass the borders of Hong Kong.
Please help remember 8964 Tiananmen Square Massacre. That summer day, Beijing citizens asked Hong Kongers to please remember this event for them because they knew they wouldn’t be able to afford to remember it themselves. Now that Hong Kongers can’t afford to remember it anymore, I’m hoping that everyone who reads this to please remember it, for the students who perished only because they wanted their government to be better, for the Tank Man who, on his way home with his groceries, decided to stand in front of a tank all by himself because it was the right thing to do.
I mean, when people literally have to invent the date “May 35th” because “June 4th” is censored, you know that there’s something major that people in power don’t want to have discussed.
2087
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