BLUE ROOM

mostly fanart and fic illustration - danny phantom, voltron, MHA, homestuck, taz, trollhunters, et al.

[phobs-heh]

Sauron taking a bath of lava.Because you know. When you’re mad,you need a good bath of lava.“Ah,my master is a dork. I need something relaxing.”

I like the whole lava thing,as much as Sauron is a creature of earth,fire and metal,he needs some nice warm place to live. Nice warm lava river somewhere in Angband.

Actually,I’m just continue to test my new tablet x) May be I will finish this sketch later. Or may be not…

[gifak-net]

[unclefather]

A goddess

[elegantpaws]

Decadent

[weirdplutoprince]

Afflicted with a terrible condition called Making A Face When I Dislike Something, which makes me terribly unpopular at department stores.

[boomer-mythology-destroyer]

[nn-ee-zz]

The Seven Deadly Sins

[paperpatchnotes]

Lol full comic 😅 I feel like I've seen enough fanart now to know we all thought this scene was amazing

(side note - credit to yuner0523 for their very good visualization of pings and the feed that i def used)

[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.

[rudavoidish]

Y'all if you're American please email your politicians and senators against the parents decide act. I'm fucking begging because we're reaching a tipping point.

[hetrosjistin]

Call or Write Congress About H.R. 8250: Parents Decide Act - GovTrack.us

Quick and easy link to both find your congressmen/women and giving you a quick and easy way to copy / paste the message into it. You want to oppose. It's an act that will demand that all major OS makers integrate a direct forced age verification control into all OS.

[rudavoidish]

I received a comment on this that I figured would be very helpful- it's a template for communicating with your representatives. Be sure to use it for reference

Dear Representative [Name],

I am writing to express my strong opposition to H.R. 8250 (The "Parents Decide Act"). As your constituent and a concerned citizen, I believe this bill introduces unprecedented risks to digital privacy and security.

Specifically, I am alarmed by:

SEC. 2(a)(1)(B): Requiring age verification to even use an operating system creates a mandatory "hardware lockout" that ends anonymous computing and forces users to hand over sensitive identification data to major corporations just to power on their devices.

SEC. 2(a)(3): Mandating that OS providers create a system for all app developers to access verification data is a massive security vulnerability. This effectively creates a centralized API of user identities accessible to thousands of third-party developers, many of whom may lack adequate data protection.

This bill does not protect children; it creates a centralized surveillance infrastructure at the OS level. I urge you to protect the privacy of your constituents and vote NO on H.R. 8250.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]

[Your Zip Code]

[willowtree1527]

This is a hell that us down under in Australia are already living in, and it’s not even effective at what it claims to do in protecting children.

Given that, in the wake of this mandatory identification policy, my country seems to be moving to hand over its citizens biometric data, like fingerprints, Face ID files, and identification documents, over to the USA and to ICE to maintain the visa free travel (ESTA) we have, I strongly urge any US resident to send these emails, or make calls.

But if you can’t do that, the most powerful thing you can do is spread the word. Tell your friends, family, coworkers, anyone who can help.

My reach will likely be small, and so I don’t know if this will mean very much in the grand scheme of things, but I cannot stand to see this tracking happen to another population as it did to mine.

And if you think it won’t affect you, it will. All anonymity goes out the window when your accounts can be linked via your personal ID

I wish you all luck in preventing this act from going through.

[mossdftba]

I called my representative and left a voice message!

[humming-fly]

Here’s the 5calls script to make it easy! https://5calls.org/issue/age-verification-internet-privacy/

[puppygirllaika]

Could you personally navigate a cross-country road trip, door to door, without your electronics (phone/computer/tablet/etc)?

Yes

No

Voting ended onMay 29

[puppygirllaika]

every other note on this post is someone going "am i allowed to use paper maps?" yes. obviously. i did not say "without a map", i said without your electronics. And to the like, 20% of people saying "of course, i would simply take the train" that is definitionally not a road trip. i love trains too, but that is a rail trip. a road trip requires taking a trip on the road.

[puppygirllaika]

#a train can go on the road if you believe hard enough

casey jones off the shits

[sarapsys]

yeah but i sure would need to burn hella CDs first

[phantomrose96]

I'm very very glad that my knee-jerk, gut-feeling, primal-instinct reaction to seeing a Default Influencer is embarrassment. I think this saves me from a lot of bullshit.

[phantomrose96]

Some lip-filler lady on enough Ozempic to euthanize a horse: "The sad truth is an elite lifestyle takes money and discipline. Buy these brands on credit if you have to. Skip meals."

Me: "Oh. Oh I'm physically experiencing the effects of secondhand embarrassment. You live like this? This is your life? Your interiority? If I was anything like this I'd kill myself I think."

[phantomrose96]

To be clear ☝️, absolutely not gender-exclusive. Some broccoli-haired shirtless 23-year-old man on enough trenbolone to euthanize a different horse starts talking about how to be a high-value male and I start thinking instantly about how I'd have 4,000 slugs use me as a jungle-gym before I'd want this man within cootie-contagion distance of me.

[phantomrose96]

[refuzz]

[phantomrose96]

Respect for my soldiers… she’s saving him… the hons…

[maidthings]

the people making "quick and easy" recipes display baseline levels of executive function typically only achievable via alarmingly high habitual doses of stimulants

[sarapsys]

"super easy dinner for when you don't feel like cooking" and they start chopping an onion like. no see. that right there's the exact kind of crap I don't feel like doing

[sarapsys]

the specific agony of a deeply emotional, dramatic scene in a show or movie that's part of a subplot or character arc you have zero emotional investment in and are just waiting for it to get back to the part of the story you DO find compelling

[evil-genius-shark]

I know the points been made, but god damn, Gideon must have been terrifying for most of Canaan House. She is this muscle bound mute wearing half assembled skull face paint and dark robes, often skulking around the building with her creepy necromancer out of sight. The first time anyone sees her duel she doesn’t seem to register this as a sport and instead just bodies the other cavalier. She’s from a planet of weird monks and nuns who love bones and she is either so pious she took a vow of silence or care so little of everyone else that she simple has nothing to say. The moment things start to deteriorate amongst the various houses she and her necromancer are ready to tear shit up.

Then she opens her mouth and she is this dumbass jock who may only think about swords and boobs. 10/10 perfect character.

[jerreeeeeee]

an important thing to note is that although taako is both gay and lup’s best friend, he is not her gay best friend. kravitz is her gay best friend. she says something along the lines of “kravitz is the gay best friend i never had” and taako gets all offended like what are you talking about?? i’m your gay best friend. you’ve had a gay best friend your entire life. you were literally born with a gay best friend. and she’s like no you’re not. you’re my lameass gay brother its different. kravitz is bitchy and into drama and fashion. when i ask what kravitz thinks about how i look he gives me actual good advice and gasses me up while doing it. you have a mullet. the other night i asked if you wanted to watch drag race and you said no i want to watch masterchef and you made me watch masterchef. and taako’s like you love masterchef and we had a great time. and lup is like yes i do and we did but that’s not my point

[drchucktingle]

WOW I AM INCREDIBLE. I AM MADE OF BLOOD AND ELECTRICITY AND I CHANGE THE WORLD ALL THE TIME. VERY COOL

[storybookprincess]

being sick & miserable objectively sucks, but it has become significantly easier to cope with since learning that “sickness behavior” is a well documented part of the body’s immune response

feeling not only physically but also emotionally like fucking garbage is unfortunately an extremely effective way to force your body to prioritize fighting infection & keeping you alive. i don’t have to like it, but knowing why i get weepy & pathetic when sick does help at least a little

[autumn2may]

i just found out that this is not common knowledge and am reblogging so more people know

YOUR BODY DOES THIS ON PURPOSE

YOU ARE NOT A BAD PERSON BECAUSE OR "WEAK" WHEN YOU ARE SICK IF YOU CAN"T CARRY ON AS NORMAL

[tartrazeen]

Rereading this on my sick days 🙏🏽

[survivablyso]

... so if you have a loved one with a chronic illness maybe go easy on them if they're like this permanently it's not their fault

[grynwood]

Remember to hydrate your necro 💧