blackout!

N | 31 | the most powerful practitioner of psychokinesis and telepathy in the world | any pronouns | talks in tags a lot | eng-ru

[neuromantis]

- Richard Siken. Birds Hover The Trampled Field.

👁️👁️👁️

You may call me N, N/A or Nada. Nameless if you are feeling fancy. I follow from @ihavenoeyesandimustsee and use any pronouns including plural. The capital F Family I mention "are" "not" "real" "people", the lowercase f family are.

I am a known scientist of the unsavory, so beware.

You can ask for my AO3 off-anon or DM, GLHF.

[syekick-powers]

ive been thinking a lot about iron lung movie still and today i had. a horrifying thought. more iron lung spoilers below.

like. the movie went to a lot of effort to show the viewer drops of liquid coming off every surface of the sub. including when the liquid in question is just clear instead of being red and bloody. and i was very curious about the point of these environmental storytelling shots because i wanted to understand what was being hinted at. eva says it's "just condensation" but if it was "just condensation", then why would the movie go out of its way to focus on all of these tiny little drips of water running off multiple surfaces in the sub? if it's just water, it's no big deal right?

but today i realized...

that clear liquid that was dripping off everything in the beginning... it seemed a bit too thick to be just regular water condensation.

then i thought:

what if it wasn't water condensation.

what if it was fucking plasma.

what if the blood was leaking into the sub from the beginning but at first only the plasma could get in, so everyone thought it was just normal old water.

[willgrahamscock]

if you see me liking contradicting headcanons for the same character just know it's because I do not give a fuck and I have an active imagination #hewouldsaythat

[iguanamouth]

I really like winnie the pooh, Can you draw winnie the pooh pleaseeeeee

[transjudas]

never take for granted the moments when you’re not nauseous

[neuromantis]

what if the next time my boss yell-cusses me out for an absolute fucking nothingburger, just because he's annoyed at something else entirely and i happened to be in the vicinity and say something unrelated, i just start crying uncontrollably and fall to my knees and start muttering about how scared i am of men yelling at me for nothing because my late father did that all the time and it usually came with a beating afterwards...

...because that's how i sincerely feel in those moments. but i have to just swallow it down and keep on keeping on.

[persephoneme]

you can't say "hey has anyone noticed that M/M fic outnumbers F/F like 100:1” or “it feels racist that only 3/202 characters on the ao3 top 100 ships list are Black and two of them are Alastor HazbinHotel” bc some ppl will start going like “oh so you think we should FORCE people to write about things they DON’T CARE ABOUT for WOKE????” and you’ll be like “no, i’m pointing out that the conditions that created this disparity are informed by racism & misogyny” and ppl will say “it’s not BIGOTED to only care about WHITE MEN” and then the gargoyle king appears

[tlirsgender]

I feel like . A lot of Being Autistic is giving people way too much benefit of the doubt cause you're trying not to have a social anxiety paranoia doom spiral but sometimes they really and truly just are treating you like that & you have to be the crazy one & be like I know you're fucking lying to me

Like oh yeah no it's not that I didn't notice. I've just been ignoring it. Yknow. Which somehow feels worse and stupider than if I really didn't know any better

[sashayed]

has anyone figured out how to turn off the thing where you love your pet so much it slides inexorably into grief-borrowing

[boomstab-papa]

[your-cosmic-creature]

“For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

[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.

[charl0ttan]

being myself performatively

[senatortedcruz]

Didn't you retweet incest porn on 9/11?

we all mourn in different ways

[jessaerys]

[suspiriously]

this time i’m really gonna do it

[amphibianshaped]

[saltedpin]

i think what does kind of make me go ??? about a lot of the way people talk about yuusaku and ogata and their relationship is that it often seems like ppl are looking at it as a fraught sibling relationship on a purely interpersonal basis and divorced from the context they’re in, and also, with the usual idea that everything is a simple perpetrator/victim binary, but i just think it misses a lot of things that are more interesting about it in that they are both (and everyone else) operating in a setting where there really isn't a moral choice available to them within the confines of the roles they have been given AND ARE complicit in acting out. i mean a lot of what gk argues is that they're all so warped by the time and place they live that it's impossible to act in a moral way, and both yuusaku and ogata are orbiting each other, trapped in this situation that's forced them into this position where they CAN'T be normal about each other.

(which is again mb why ppl have so much struggle with the very very present and obvious incest subtext, but like i have said, i think it's a lot weirder to pretend ogata and yuusaku's relationship is normal than to just be like 'noda wrote this intentionally strange and uncomfortable’)

because the whole entirety of society is set up to push young men into the military based on the lie that this is for a higher cause and yuusaku in particular is shown to have a father who is pushing him personally into that role, and it IS significant that every time he expresses an opinion - and actually disagrees with ogata and argues with him - those opinions aren’t coming from him, they’re coming from koujirou (with the kind of huge exception of wanting to have a relationship with ogata and according him the superior position as the elder brother in the family structure!!!!! which is kind of ridiculous considering that yuusaku is the legitimate son and ogata is the son of a discarded mistress, and yuusaku is a second lieutenant and ogata is a superior private).

yuusaku refusing to have sex with a woman in a brothel (or kill a pow, though that of course IS the correct decision, morally, which goes without saying, it’s just that that scene is a jumping off point for the other things he says about maintaining his virginity and following the other - applicable only to him - edict that he not kill anyone) isn't a 'moral' decision, it's one based on the fucked up ideals he's been raised to uphold that don't do anyone any good, least of all himself. the whole point is that yuusaku can be right about ogata and the question of guilt and a nice person but he's still trapped in and conditioned by this horrible set of rules that are more or less inescapable (unless you are the dual protagonists of the manga, and then it takes you 31 volumes to figure it out); likewise, ogata finally has what he wants close to being in his grasp but the issue is that then he undergoes a self-realisation that renders all of that utterly and completely pointless and he realises how everything he's been chasing is stupid and means nothing in the face of a massive avalanche of guilt and regret.

i dunno, i just think characters who’re both being absolutely crushed by but also actively participating in this horrifying system of patriarchy and militarism are more interesting than the good and bad debate we usually get when talking about them :((((

[sobcat]

BAN MONDAY BAN MONDAY!!!

[sobcat]

[xaeyrnofnbe]