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report and block. i'd also appreciate it if you shared this post, bc that blog was JUST created and was already tagging a LOT of people, and i know not everyone has the scam-sensing instinct, even if this might seem obvious to some.
returning to my roots with more huntrixgenius as a birthday gift for my friend @frogsnfungi203 !!! can you tell i'm weak for zoemira getting pattern tattoos of their own? :')
I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.
If you don't want LinkTree putting your imagery into AI... get out now
Just canceled my account (not that I used it that much). But I won’t permit this. Via @unaminh.bsky.social:
IMPORTANT: For any artists/writers/etc etc, using Linktree to point people to their work, from 5 July, they'll be feeding all imagery you use on your landing page into DALL-E by OpenAI.
Setting the knife down and turning, Mira is confronted with Zoey holding up a dumpling that has two cat ears sticking up and two mismatched eyes pointed in opposite directions. “He’s not that lumpy. Or blue.”
“It’s art,” Zoey shoots back, “I’m capturing his spirit.”
“In a dumpling. That someone is going to eat,” Mira deadpans, enjoying the way that Zoey’s eyes light up, mouth already open for her comeback. In her peripheral vision, she can see Rumi pause in her work, smiling softly as she watches the exchange.
Zoey lifts the Derpling a bit higher. “It’s called cuteness aggression, Mira. Don’t you ever see something so adorable that you just want to bite it?”
Mira just tilts her head, making sure Zoey can’t miss her smirk, small but unmistakeable.
Portrait commission by the magnificient @s-aint-elmo of Sussie Su-ji from "love can't make you strong (until love can make you weak)", an ongoing KPDH polytrix AU by @barrhorn and me! Once again thank you SO MUCH to ket, they are beautiful and ready to eviscerate (with friendship)
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.
YAKETYSMAX DRAWS FANFICS!
My series where I draw fics I really love. If I know the author's tumblr tag I've included it, so go check em out!
Here's the max i can upload to tumblr dot com isle of derangement in one go, so I guess this is PART 1! check my kpdh fic tag for more fic art/recs and eyecrimes, or follow this on 'yaketysmax draws fanfics' on ao3. Go read those fics and send the authors your love! Thanks so much for all the wonderful fics authors! The eyecrimes will continue!
will you accept this rose? @erros429 https://archiveofourown.org/works/70039236
The real thing @frenchsoda https://archiveofourown.org/works/69331621
Tangled as These Sheets @tenderlumberjack https://archiveofourown.org/works/67948306
The Unchanging Polaris arsonide https://archiveofourown.org/works/67836921
The Birds the bees and the demons yeahnoyeah https://archiveofourown.org/works/73574071
Master Of Illusion @erros429 https://archiveofourown.org/works/76796446
Counter Punch by Get_jinxxed13 @thepointofnotexisting
https://archiveofourown.org/works/72041061
ink & honey @ghostgrlonfirst https://archiveofourown.org/works/74890661
I practice what I preach (and I’m pretty on my knees) @somethinglikesawyer
https://archiveofourown.org/works/79584591
residual flare @unicyclehippo https://archiveofourown.org/works/73211901
on your side (lets go to a wedding) @kayross https://archiveofourown.org/works/67865566
12 days to fall in love (with you) @NORsevvy https://archiveofourown.org/works/75341066
show me (how to love you) @honestground https://archiveofourown.org/works/73090166
who we're born to be @arendellesfirstwinter https://archiveofourown.org/works/80083316
girl could make a mannequin hungry @dreamhardflyfree https://archiveofourown.org/works/68634286
Fast Car Allegorical_Cave_Dweller @theallegoricalcavedweller https://archiveofourown.org/works/72178681
wisteria, you resilient thing @avirxy
https://archiveofourown.org/works/72528381
the worst of what i came from @ghostgrlonfirst https://archiveofourown.org/works/73305326
let me be a little less liminal geekchic64 @whatwordsmiss
https://archiveofourown.org/works/69030616
these wheels keep turning, but they're running out of steam Counterpunch @counterpunches https://archiveofourown.org/works/73634466
What happens in Vegas… demodemodex https://archiveofourown.org/works/78201971
Paradise @Ghostbitsforkicks https://archiveofourown.org/works/73454161
i left a party for you (i'vе been thinking about you, too) @norsevvy https://archiveofourown.org/works/79556816
paint my frozen heart with fire @arendellesfirstwinter https://archiveofourown.org/works/75274831
on a tight leash cleaver (onthechoppingblock) https://archiveofourown.org/works/68738096
three in the morning, over like that @ghostgrlonfirst https://archiveofourown.org/works/72048051
so we were liars @arendellesfirstwinter https://archiveofourown.org/works/69422271
There are many benefits to being a marine biologist (in training) BiFelicia @deadbiwrites
https://archiveofourown.org/works/70287951
gimme that candyfloss arsonide https://archiveofourown.org/works/68994691
lonely lavender bones @yanniest yannie https://archiveofourown.org/works/80318826/
Falling in love (don't try this at home!) @natyugho jungleboyjackjackperry https://archiveofourown.org/works/75999681
[Abs]solutely Not Falling In Love @Stebeans https://archiveofourown.org/works/67194856
i wasn't there (but i know) @dreampaladin https://archiveofourown.org/works/74415776
ain’t gonna bite, come on over (i know you wanna move a little closer) yeahnoyeah https://archiveofourown.org/works/70691481
girls on film (see you together) @honestground https://archiveofourown.org/works/79666226
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
Here is an article from NPR about it (May 22, 2026):
Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click.
"Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said.
Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from.
"If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."
And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):
While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model.
Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.
And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:
When Google first started implementing AI-assisted results, news publishers warned of “catastrophic” impacts on the industry, much of which relies on Google search to drive users to their websites.
Last year, news websites saw significant traffic declines as chatbots increasingly replaced Google search as the primary way to find sites and ask questions.
Small businesses also noted drops in traffic to their sites from Google, which has traditionally delivered customers.
Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy & research at Amsive, a digital marketing agency, warned as early as last year that Google’s planned changes to search are “going to have a devastating impact on the Internet.”
“It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.
