queerleigh

Episcopal | Aspirant | 🏳️‍⚧️

[queerleigh]

St. Maximilian Kolbe, St. Edith Stein, St. Titus Brandsma, blessed Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and all who lost their lives opposing fascist regimes in the defiant hope for a world of peace, pray for us and give us the strength and courage to be the light of Christ in an ever darkening world.

[olicrosse]

Monks and nature, what more could you want? :)

[sacredheart-stigmata]

Our Lady, Mother of Ferguson and All Those Killed by Gun Violence

Our Lady, Mother of Ferguson and All Those Killed by Gun Violence, often shortened to 'Our Lady of Ferguson', was created in 2015 by Black iconographer Mark Doox, after being commissioned by Rev. Dr. Mark Francisco Bozzuti-Jones for the Trinity Church in New York City. The icon was made to honor Michael Brown, a Black teen murdered at the hands of Darren Wilson, a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer, in 2014. While Black Lives Matter and similar groups had already established their presence in the United States following the murder of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown's brutal murder brought all eyes across the United States onto the movement and forced the reality of police brutality onto the TV screens and twitter feeds of white usamericans who refused to acknowledge that reality.

Rev. Bozzuti-Jones, a Jamaican priest at Trinity Church, an Episcopal church in Manhattan, commissioned the icon to honor Michael Brown and all other African Americans taken by police violence. Rev. Bozzuti-Jones, who is known for his racial activism and writings in the Episcopal church, chose Mark Doox for his bold, unflinching combination of Blackness and religion. Influenced by Byzantine iconography and Dadaism, Doox describes his art as such:

Blending narrative elements, historical references, and spiritual iconography in his Byz Dada style, Mark aims to create works that challenge viewers to confront sometimes uncomfortable truths about race, Identity, and power in American history. His commitment to addressing these existential themes head-on aims to explore deep cultural and historical issues while inviting reflection, conversation, and healing.

Doox continues to create icons for the Episcopal and African-Orthodox churches, and recently published "The N–Word of God", a graphic novel and art book. You can purchase it here

[bvbblebeam]

good morning gay people!!

[ottermatopoeia]

[bvbblebeam]

happy pride everyone

[queerleigh]

Happy Pride to my favorite icon of Christ ever (Christ of Latomos, 5th century)

Translation of the scroll: "Behold our God in whom we hope and rejoice in our salvation, he will give rest to this house."

I love you fem-passing-Jesus-sitting-on-a-rainbow-throne

[queerleigh]

Happy Pride to my favorite icon of Christ ever (Christ of Latomos, 5th century)

Translation of the scroll: "Behold our God in whom we hope and rejoice in our salvation, he will give rest to this house."

I love you fem-passing-Jesus-sitting-on-a-rainbow-throne

[sicut-in-caelo-et-in-terra]

what he says: I’m fine

what he means: Jesus crucified and Jesus resurrected must both be proclaimed and the tendency of our culture to remove one or the other completely is a scary indication of the deadly polarization that is occurring. Mercy and justice are one and the same; to proclaim justice alone with no mercy is to bar people from entering the faith and to proclaim mercy alone with no justice is to distill the faith until it becomes little more than an aesthetic. To take away Jesus’s cross is to rob Him of His throne; to ignore His resurrection is to forget His victory.

[and-her-saints]

you better thank God Holy Trinity Father who Art in Heaven Creator of the Universe and His Only Begotten Jesus Christ and God Holy Spirit RIGHT NOW that you can breathe through both of your nostrils...

[magdaleneanthony]

in a kill it with your sword kill it with your sword amen mood today

[productofaritual]

Love character relationships that can only be described as "whatever the fuck these two have going on"

[oncillaphoenix]

the spirit is willing but the flesh is experiencing technical difficulties

[shenzi-hemlock]

Touching grass is not enough, some of y’all need to touch the hem of His garment.

[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.

[and-her-saints]

"We cannot condone naïve enthusiasms, nor fuel unfounded fears. Instead, let us establish standards for discernment — the dignity of the human person, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, care for our common home and peace — and let us translate these standards into practices such as responsible planning, the assessment of human and social impact, the inclusion of the most vulnerable, the promotion of digital literacy and guiding research and industry toward justice and peace."

— "Magnifica Humanitas" by Pope Leo XIV (2026) par. 14

[stkateri-deactivated20260526]

[demigirl-in-christ]

the queer christian experience

[demigirl-in-christ]

your kind words bring me great joy <3

[nora-yoko]

[transastronautistic]

ID: illustration of a black cat with its back to us sitting among (larger than life) clover plants