in which murderbot is a very normal terracotta soldier and ART the dragon spirit of a chinese junk who dwells in the ship's keel. they meet in the ming dynasty perhaps, when ppl are sailing places extra willy-nilly.
*NĂĽwa is the mother goddess in chinese mythology, known for creating humanity from yellow clay and repairing the sky.
thank you @mutualrapport for hosting the event! original prompt below.
[drawn for the prompt: an AU of ART and MB's first meeting and conversation - e.g. another look at their first meeting from a fantasy, historical, or (non-canon) sci-fi lens! Any perspective is fine. The only constraint is that it cannot be set in the canon universe. Any visibly non-canon AU- fantasy, human, historical, etc. - anything goes!]
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.
*thinks about OCs* *Thinks about OCs* *thinks about OCs* *thinks About OCs* *thinks about OCs* *Thinks About OCs* *thinks about OCs* *THINKS ABOUT OCS* *thinks about OCs* *thinks about OCS* *thinks about OCs* *THINKS about OCs* *thinks about OCs* *thinks ABOUT OCs* *thinks about OCs* *thinks about OCs* *Thinks about OCs* *thinks about OCs* *thinks About OCs* *thinks about OCs* *Thinks About OCs* *thinks about OCs* *THINKS ABOUT OCS* *thinks about OCs* *thinks about OCS* *thinks about OCs* *THINKS about OCs* *thinks about OCs* *thinks ABOUT OCs* *thinks about OCs*
being too warm during the day: well, this sucks, but this temperature makes sense because the sun is up, and the sun is making me warm. i am unhappy but logically i can deal with it for now.
being too warm at night: what if i kill everybody.
141 is a prestigious, Michelin restaurant with accolades the world over.
John is quickly going broke taking care of his nephew and needs a job. He has no experience in the hospitality industry and finds fine dining to be a ludicrous display of overindulgence, but a job is a job. Besides which, the chef at 141 is something of an urban legend, and John is endlessly curious.
———
My gift to Goblin for finishing the most delightful story: “First, Eat”
I was pointed in the direction of this fic a few months ago and simply couldn’t put it down. What a beautiful and satisfying close to a genuinely delightful AU. A fandom classic, for sure.
“Where are the trans men in history?” See. When you're born a gender that was forcefully married off, who had to live most of their life indoors, when you had to raise children, and had a lobotomy if your family thought you were a tad too odd, it's kinda hard to come out as a trans man now ain't it.
Hey, so, I know I have a lot of non-horsey followers who may not know about horse biomechanics. Which means I have an opportunity to teach.
If you ever see a horse wearing these padded 'shoes' (called stacks) on its feet, you are looking at an abused horse
Stacks are used in a riding discipline called padded performance, or more commonly known as big lick. In this discipline, the goal is to create as big and flashy of a walk as possible.
To get a big flashy walk, big lick trainers put weights on the horse's front feet (to make it lift the legs higher) and use action chains, which smack against the ankles every time the horse moves (making it lift the legs faster to try and escape from the painful chains). Though it's technically illegal, many trainers also use soring, where they rub mustard oil or kerosene onto the horse's ankles (to cause pain so it has a stronger reaction to the action chains). Soring is widely accepted in padded performance, and trainers will apply chemical irritants to their horses at shows, out in the open for everyone to see.
Horses naturally carry 60% of their body weight on the front legs. When the front legs are sore, they'll carry more weight on their hind legs, which causes rapid joint degeneration. It's not unheard of for retired big lick horses to have completely deformed hind legs
There is no ethical way to do padded performance. Big lick riders will talk about how stacks don't cause issues (often citing one study that looked at padded horses slowly walking on a treadmill without rider), how soring is illegal, how hard-working their farriers are, how closely they work with veterinarians, how their horses live like kings, how beloved their horses are, etc., but it's all talk.
If you see a horse with stacks, you are looking at an abused horse.
I'll add a few relevant videos under the cut (from least to most graphic)
Adding on that stacks are used not just in big lick with Tennessee Walkers but also in a less extreme but still damaging form in other disciplines and breeds. There are stacked/padded Saddlebreds, Arabians, Morgans, Hackney, etc. You'll see people within those disciplines arguing that it's less extreme than big lick and therefore, not detrimental to the horse but still causes changes to the gait and natural structure of the legs.
