The Seerblade is a weapon. The Seerblade is not a weapon. The Seerblade brings death, and comfort. The Seerblade sees the future, it is the blade of prophecy. It is not made of steel, it is harder. It yields as the wind, and yet is as destructive as a hurricane.
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.
you don’t deserve to be confined to some bleak room playing video games for the rest of your lives. you don’t deserve to live in a world where cis people and men project their fantasies and disgust onto your bodies. you don’t deserve to merely survive. you deserve to grow. you deserve to feel your own feelings without shame. you deserve the freedom to cry out and take up space. you deserve joy
Tumblr staff was getting tired of endless tgirl and decided the largest unabashedly Black and transfeminist transmasc would be a perfect nostalgia snack. “See! We ban diversely, we ban the Blacks in addition to white trannies :)”
To be clear, Salem has also had a concerted harassment campaign against them which is likely the cause of this. It’s not something new or particularly unsurprising, it’s a documented white supremacist site doing white supremacy in its moderation and allowing white supremacists, transphobes, and transmisogynists (a mostly overlapping triple venn diagram) to utilize their site to harm the most marginalized among us over and over.
How long are you motherfuckers gonna keep letting this happen? As long as they are able to keep doing this arbitrarily to marginalized folks, especially historically Black people, transfemmes, sex workers, etc. At the whims of harassment campaigns, none of us will be safe. We will keep watching our friends disappear, we will keep watching medical, survival, etc. fundraisers die off, we will keep seeing this site become more fucking fascist as more marginalized folks get scattered to further and smaller corners of the internet again. If you can say or do something, put to fucking action your thoughts don’t just sit there anymore, fucking speak up about whats been happening!
Salem did nothing besides be a beacon of love, Black positivity, and support for his transfem friends. He made beautiful art to express his Blackness, the experience of being trans, and his desire to make people with beautiful bodies be seen, and I guess we just can't have that positivity here, or were you tired of banning trannies you decided to be racist as well?
After everything he went through, this is how you treat him?
Between this, and the previous terming of Yaybunnies, it must one again be reiterated that Black people being loud and positive about their Blackness is not allowed on this racist site.
And, because the userbase is also just as racist, it can be even harder to drum up as much awareness and positivity for is drummed up for even white transfems.
Don't let them get away with this. Reinstate @wolfertinger66
Again, fuck you @staff @humans @photomatt
Ghouls, every last one of you behind the controls of this.
If you want to stand up for transgender Canadians, then there's a petition to ask the federal government to repeal the acts signed into law that restrict transgender medical care for transgender youth:
You need only be a resident of Canada, not a citizen to sign. Please help us give transgender youth a fighting chance. Their medical care decisions should be between the handling physician and family only. This isn't a matter for politicians to decide.
sickening to think about life is strange in the context of it just being like.. a bunch of scared kids. you know? there are no one-dimensional characters. each and every one of them is deeper than they seem at first glance, deeper than most casual players assume them to be.
some of them are questionable — take chloe, warren, victoria’s friends. even max to an extent. some of them plain suck — take nathan and victoria herself. some of them are plain good, like kate.
but they’re all teenagers, fresh into adulthood and figuring it out as they go, and some of them are doing good and some of them fuck it up bad.
especially victoria and nathan. victoria is bitchy and downright cruel at times, but she’s not heartless, and she does show remorse (even if it’s too little too late.) nathan is.. a lot, i could talk about him for hours (and have), but his character boils down to a freshly 18 year old who was repeatedly abused and did some very, very bad things as a result.
none of them are evil. we see as much in the alternate universe. they’re full humans, of course, and they’re flawed and some of them have done bad things, but they’re all just a bunch of high schoolers.
everything, and i mean everything bad that happened was due to the adults — jefferson, frank, wells, david, mr. amber, frank, damon, so on and so forth. people approach this story with frustratingly little nuance, and i suppose i understand because most of us are the same age as the protagonists (or younger).
but stripped to the bare bones LIS is a story about a bunch of kids who were abused, taken advantage of, lied to, and ignored by the adults around them. they’re certainly not all innocent but none of them are evil.
so. not to doxx myself (i've talked about this here before though) but i live in Kansas. and my license was just revoked very suddenly and immediately because i'm trans and had changed my gender marker.
so now i cannot legally drive or vote until/unless i let them force me to carry around a card that misgenders me and outs me as trans, because i certainly don't look female anymore.
so hey if you have the means and want to help with any of this, please consider donating to the ACLU of Kansas because they are at least going to try to do something to push back against this, and i'm such a panicky wreck that the only thing i can do to get through my immediate gut reaction to having my license revoked tonight (i cannot stress enough that i received the letter today saying that my license is no longer valid tomorrow) is focus on the fact that there's at least one entity trying to protect me and my fellow trans kansans.
Today, transgender people across Kansas are reporting receiving letters from the Kansas Division of Vehicles stating that they must surrender their driver's licenses and that their current credentials will be considered invalid upon the law's publication in the Kansas Register on Thursday. Should any transgender person be caught driving without a valid license, they could face a class B misdemeanor carrying up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. Kansas already requires county jails to house inmates according to sex assigned at birth. The letter, obtained by Erin in the Morning, marks one of the most significant erosions of transgender civil rights in the United States to date.
The letter, which has been reported to Erin In The Morning by a Kansas-based activist, states that under House Substitute for Senate Bill 244, Kansas-issued driver's licenses and identification cards must now reflect the credential holder's “sex at birth.” It warns that upon the law's publication in the Kansas Register on Thursday, February 26, current credentials for affected individuals "will no longer be valid." The Legislature, the letter notes, "did not include a grace period for updating credentials," and anyone operating a vehicle without a valid credential "may be subject to additional penalties." Those whose gender marker does not match their sex assigned at birth are directed to surrender their current credential to the Division of Vehicles for reissuance.
[...]
The consequences for noncompliance could escalate quickly. Under Kansas law, driving without a valid license is a class B misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine—though first-time offenders are more likely to face a citation and fine. A conviction, however, triggers an automatic 90-day license suspension. If a person drives during that suspension, they face a charge of driving on a suspended license, which carries a mandatory minimum of five days in jail. Kansas already requires county jails to house inmates by sex assigned at birth.
[...]
As a result of this extreme anti-transgender law, the state of Kansas has seen its status deteriorate to a "Do Not Travel" warning in the EITM Trans Risk Map. Transgender people should exercise extreme caution when traveling through the state, and those already living there should take immediate steps to legally protect themselves in the face of laws that could strip their driving privileges, expose them to criminal penalties, and subject them to thousand-dollar bounties simply for using a restroom. For most transgender people who do not already live in Kansas, the risk is now too great to travel there at all.
The Kansas Division of Vehicles sent letters to trans Kansans to surrender their driver's licenses and ID cards matching their gender identity to obtain new SB244-compliant driver’s licenses and ID cards listing their sex assigned at birth.
This is an incalculably evil and transphobic act by Kansas authorities as a result of trans erasure and bathroom ban bill SB244 taking effect.
See Also:
LGBTQ Nation: Kansas sends letters to trans people demanding they surrender their driver’s licenses
To my Canadian followers, here is a petition on the House of Commons website aiming to revoke permissions that would allow ICE offices to operate on Canadian soil, and to cancel funding and subsidies to Canadian companies who are arming ICE agencies with services, goods, and surveillance technologies that would further enable the lawlessness and abuses that ICE has committed. When you sign, you must click on the confirmation email link that will be sent to the email you sign with in order to verify your signature, otherwise it will not be counted.
For my non-Canadian followers, please share this petition and hopefully this will further the reach to other Canadian users on this platform. It is abominable that any company in this country help or in any way facilitate the unconstitutional and dehumanising acts that ICE has done.
In my city of Vancouver, we have been protesting and boycotting Hootsuite, a social media platform that has a $2M USD contract with DHS providing them with social media services from 2024 to 2029. Hootsuite claims they don't use tracking or surveillance with their tools, but the mere fact that they have chosen to work with the violent group in whatever social media capacity, despite previously *turning down* a contract with them back in 2020, is egregious.
Jim Pattison Group is a enormous conglomerate also based in Vancouver, owned and run by one man, Jim Pattison. Pattison previously considered selling an industrial building in Virginia to ICE for them to use as another "holding and processing facility," or more accurately, a goddamn concentration camp, but because of backlash he reversed that decision. Thank fucking god for that, but that does not mean he won't reconsider it again in the future.
In Ontario, ICE ordered 20 armoured vehicles from a Brampton firm called Roshel to the tune of $7.3M USD. Canada should not be arming a violent group that has shown itself to be nothing more than a racist group of masked kidnappers and power-tripping thugs that has violated the rights of US citizens and violated numerous court orders.
I'm disgusted that there are Canadian companies that are willingly partnering with DHS and ICE despite the carnage that has been documented over the last year. It is exactly why I've signed this petition and am sharing it with you. Do not let any Canadian companies think they can rest easy by choosing to work with a violent group that is terrorising, abusing, and murdering US citizens of all walks of life, all at the orders of a fascist government run by abusers and tyrants.
This petition adds a call to end the Safe Third Country Agreement, which I had never heard of before. Essentially, it's a policy from 2004 stating that Canada considers the US as a safe country for refugees, and therefore won't accept refugee claimants at the US/Canada border. I'm horrified.
Non-Canadians, here is the Amnesty International page on the topic.
I need to set the record straight for queer people who don’t have a transphobic government holding their birth certificate hostage.
In the United States the average native-born citizen can prove their definitive citizenship in terms of eligibility for work through either a birth certificate or a passport. Birth certificates are legally owned and issued by the government of the state you are born in.
I was born in Texas. Texas has banned trans people from changing our birth certificates to match our name and gender. Texas will put me on a list if I reveal I am trans in any legal way, including having ever applied to change my gender marker. I cannot change my birth certificate.
This means the only way I can prove my eligibility for work is with my passport. Without my passport, I can’t legally apply for work.
That is why the executive order banning trans people from changing our passports to match our gender identity is such a huge problem. It’s not boo hoo I can’t leave the country to go on vacation, it’s stripping me of my labor rights and daring me to work in a sweat shop if I want to survive.
And say I did want to cross the border because oh, I don’t know, fleeing to seek asylum in a new country suddenly becomes very important—wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a passport that matches my identification to show local authorities, so they don’t deport me back to America?
I know not everyone can read legalese, but I need the LGBT community to at least try to stay up to date and connect the dots on the legal ramifications of orders like this if we are going to fight back. Because frankly, my passport was recently threatened, and I was not impressed by the ignorance I was met with from cis gays and trans folks who hail from the east/west coast.
izzy806
kaledo-art
blakekathryn
gummygunk
andulkaphoto
turnnoffyourmind
