I think I struggle with social subtext (and maybe imposter syndrome), though I'm great at media subtext, if I do say so myself! Ace, but not Tumblr!Ace
HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY
Anyways, was rewatching bbc sherlock, and noticed mycroft wears a ring.
Speak! fair lady, thou mortal temple of all wit and learning, and unveil to me the mystery of this ring, and why it doth clasp his finger so. 😂
Anyway how are ya? Hope you are watering your plants and, taking care of yourself as well.💛
-Young Sherlock ANON
Okay here's ye mighty ask!
You already know it BUT I DID MISS YOU LUV! HIIIIIIIII
Oh yeah I've noticed that! I shall certainly speak, fair anon, and rid the mystery of tis ring!
The official story by Mark Gatiss somewhere on Twitter is that it was just a prop he wore. But you know NEVER accept the answer a Sherlock cast/crew gives 😂 IT'S NEVER THAT SIMPLE
Anyway. I give my theories:
It's a secret wedding/engagement ring. No one bothers to really tell us anything other than Sherlock, and he focuses on "Brilliant Govt" so it's entirely plausible loll. Romystrade just became more likely 😂. Nyway only thing against this is that we don't see him or her in the Christmas scene or interacting with them at all but it's entirely possible we've seen them and they were like. Huh tell the world Mycroft likes humans? Nah why would we ruin the fun 🤣
It's a signet ring. Now there's about 3k things wrong with the theory but Listen! Mycroft in BBC wears his on the right ring finger, which is where English heirs put their signet rings— while French preferred to put it on their left ring fingers, iirc. And yes I know it doesn't particularly look like one, but it's entirely possible he's simply out the crest towards himself, so we can only see the band bit. (And usually when it was faced towards you it was because you were married so Huzzah!) Also, I know that these days some people getting signet rings just get a simple gold band, so that might be it too!
This is either the most plausible or implausible depending how you look at it; but it was a gift. Something someone dear, perhaps Sherlock, gave to him at some point for some reason, and he decided to wear it as a form of comfort or something similar.
Personally, I choose to believe a combination of these three 😆 (don't break the delusion of how that's not possible loll)
Also, while we're on this topic, look at these pics from Young Sherlock because I find them OHH so interesting and need to talk to someone about them: (this is getting long and also spoilers for anyone reading that hasn't finished YS)
Do you see that lil thing on his finger? That's a (signet) ring on his left pinky finger now, which I think might be a nod to The Holmes family French ancestry, because as I mentioned French preferred to wear it on their left fingers.
I find some things interesting about Mycroft and his ring in Young Sherlock, though:
1. It's not a constant. Mycroft has a ring in these scenes and a couple others (such as in the hospital in France), but there are a lot of scenes where he doesn't have a ring on either of bis fingers. In some scenes, actually, he has it in one shot and then doesn't in the next, probably because filming happened at different times and he forgot— I actually only have these images because I screenshotted them while watching, because in most of the stills online don't have them; if you search for him and look at the pictures with his hands, except for the one in the hall in episode 2 where it's easy to miss if you're not looking for it, most of the images where his hands are seen, he's bare— like the one in Istanbul. I actually thought I'd hallucinated the ring because of those pictures lol. I had to go back and watch it all to try see if I was imagining them. I'm not sure if it was a conscious decision or not but almost all scenes where his left hand (the one with the ring when he's wearing it) is plainly seen (like open, clear), he's bare— most easily seen in the scene outside prison in the first episode. He has it on when he's walking out with Sherlock, but the moment he sits, he outs his left hand out and it's bare. Clearly they're trying to drive me to insanity 😂 It also USUALLY appears when he's with family, and slightly less-ish in general public (again when his fingers are clearly shown)
The next thing is the size. Now I either truly am losing it, or it's lighting, or the size keeps changing. Sometimes it seems chunkier than others, sometimes the stamp bit (idk what tis called) is outward and sometimes it seems to be inside and all that. I can't keep up. Maybe when the adventure becomes crazy he got himself a chameleon instead atp, because idk what else is possible with his sometimes there sometimes not ring. I'm ignoring the times I thing the ring was gold entirely as lighting, and but I. I'm really really confused. Someone tell me what's up Please because I'm tired of trying to figure that out
3. Location. Now this is my favourite part of rings— because it's just so much more fun then trying to figure the other things out. As I said, hmFrench prefer to wear it on their left fingers. What I've also mentioned is that heirs in France go with the ring finger— and where is Mycroft's ring? Lil cutie pinkie! This speaks volumes, and probably would have guven some confusing signals to the people of their time loll. See, younger sons and daughters in France (so not heirs) wear their signet rings on either the left or right pinkie finger. Where Mycroft's ring is. Which means upon meeting Mycroft most people are probably not expecting him to be the older brother. Also, the potential reason behind this is a theory loop I really enjoy.
Before I get into that, I need the memory of one thing clear in your mind luv. Silas was out of the country for most of the times in the twelve years between Beatrice's supposed death and the show taking place, which means from when Mycroft was 14 to 26. During that time, it was Mycroft taking care of everything.
Now, remember how Mycroft has almost certainly suffered abuse at the hands of Silas as a child? I think that either:
Mycroft decided for himself that he doesn't want to be seen as Silas' heir, or this could possibly be another way of being "basic normal nothing special";
Or Silas asked him to do that, as another way of throwing him down or something.
Both sound weird and implausible, but give me a mo. Traditionally, signet rings are given at 21 (probably why Sherlock doesn't have one, other than the "younger gremlin brother who's free and untied down" and all that), or at times at 18— but this was mostly a ceremonious thing. Getting a signet ring just meant your ready to go about representing your family and taking care of honour and all that— so I think it is entirely possible Mycroft got his earlier (at 14, when Silas went abroad and he got a job) because he was doing all that at 14, you know.
So if he got his earlier, it could mean that either of my theories on why it's on the pinkiemcould be right (back then, anyway). Mycroft could have chosen his pinkie because he was 14 at the time, or Silas could have asked for him to wear it on his pinkie because he was so young at the time. And then something just kept him wearing it there (perhaps habit? Perhaps he just really didn't eant to be seen as Silas' heir, perhaps Silas kept making him wear it there, after all we know he preferred Sherlock).
Nyway, uhhhmm. I hope you liked my yapping on Young Sherlock's Mycroft more than BBC (as you'd asked) because As for "BBC!Mycroft had a signet ring but Sherlock doesn't?" I mean. Have you seen that 4 year old gremlin 🤣
Huh. I think the show gave us how they want us to read the ring.
"Now, as is consistent with custom, a man knows he must wear his signet ring facing inward to represent content, not outward to represent form. Inward for noble lion, outward for tabby cat. Tell me. Which direction does your ring point?"
Sherlock definitely got that explanation drilled into him by Mycroft, right?
Look what I found. I'd literally forgotten I had this 🥺🙈 (It’s a DVD set of the first season of Granada Holmes in case you can't tell). It includes a little booklet with an excerpt from "A Study in Celluloid". The parts about Jeremy... he was such a sweetheart 🥺🥺🥺
A regular hand cast is so much nicer than trying to do an ulnar splint. that thing was truly driving me nuts. Still difficult but at least I can type almost right!
A WASP FLEW INTO MY MOUTH! And I was so brave about it! I couldn't panic because I am allergic and would have died literally. So I just exhaled really strongly and blew it right back out again! To anyone nearby it probably looked like I simply exhale live wasps. Like that's a thing I can just do. There's that.
I can still feel all of its flailing legs in my mouth. Cannot recommend. You'd think the wings of a live wasp, in your mouth, would be the worst part but you'd be wrong. It's the legs.
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.
istg there's something about AI that makes the systems thinking and labour politics leave the average tumblr user's body. there seems to be a common, fervent and deeply personal investment in thinking "everyone around me is suddenly a lazy, stupid moron" rather than "we're all subject to a deeply destructive technology pushed by people in power, at every level of fundamentally exploitative systems of employment & education"
Like I get that it might be comforting on some level to think we can somehow overcome AI by each individually becoming a bastion of heroic moral resistance, but. i'm really sorry to inform y'all. it's a labour issue. and as with all labour issues, the answer is 'we're going to have to actually start talking to each other and organizing'
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