The other day I was surfing the internet and I found this specialized painting colour wheel, it shows how real paint colours relate to each other.
Outside: the purest/brightest colours.
Inside: naturally muted or earthy colors, like browns and ochres.
The Center: dark neutral tones used for mixing shadows.
The Lines: the lines connect colors that are opposites, if you mix them you neutralize the tone creating clean grays or browns instead of muddy puddles.
I want to share this with you because I think it is really illustrative!
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.
Hello, my name is Abdulrahman Quffa, now from inside the bombing and destruction in Gaza, I hope my message reaches you and you are well. The go fonnd me account has been suspended and a new account has been created. Please stand by us. I would be truly grateful if you could help me . Every donation from you will save my family and children from death, this will support us and alleviate our suffering and encourage people to donate more help 🍉🍉 Please share, publish or donate to my family 🙏🙏🙏
https://gofund.me/95d42cb3
Abdulrahman has been stuck in Gaza since the beginning of this genocide and he is trying to evacuate him and his family to Egypt, but he’s gotten no donations so far.
I urge all of you who see this to donate what you can and share specifically TO people who can donate or bigger creators on your app. I thank you all for your understanding as this isn’t my normal content, and I did check that this man is real and he does have a family he needs evacuated.
My friends, your money can save my children's lives. 😞 🍉
Hi I'am Mohamad fromGaza supporting my wife Amal and she a mother of three young children 👨👩👧👧 🍼Our home, livelihood and our entire life are completely destroyed in this war of extermination🚨.
Now we live in a dilapidated tent among insects 🦂🕷, pollution and diseases.
Imagine my middle child telling me that her wish in life is to live in a house!‼️
Is this a life when your children wake up from their sleep wet from the rain? 💔😢
🚨 If you have $20 and you don't donate i you are participating in the extermination of my children🚨 😭😭
❤️🩹https://gofund.me/4f423be0 ❤️🩹
https://gofund.me/e92ec27a
Mohamad and Amal, i hope you and you children will be able to get to safety, as well as all Palestinians. i hope you'll get to rebuild your lives and heal.
i unfortunately can't donate, but anyone who is able, please consider donating and sharing.
I would be really grateful if you could help me with a donation to save me and my family from the dangers of war and death in Gaza and escape to a safe place.
Please share, repost or donate to my family 🙏 Please do not ignore my message 🙏🏻💔🍉🍉
https://gofund.me/e7ec06f9
I'm unable to donate but I'll share your gofundme!
, I'm Karam Al Nabih from Gaza. My home, dreams, and university have been destroyed by the war. I'm a software engineer in my final semester, and I'm urgently seeking your support to rebuild my life and help my sick mother.
Please consider donating, even a small amount like 10 or 15 £, as every contribution makes a difference. If you can't donate, please share my story to help me reach my goal. Your support means the world to me.
Reblog pin post
Donate here: https://gofund.me/a9d0f2d7
Thank you so much! 🙏❤️
Vatted by @nabulsi @90-ghost
I'll share your gofundme as I can't donate. I hope you'll be safe!
I'm Amal, 33 years old. My husband Eyad is 39, and we have seven children: Hala (15), Nour (13), Abdelrahman (11), Mohammed (9), Omar (6), Ahmed (4), and baby Hoor, just 7 months old.
Hello,
I'm Amal, 33 years old. My husband Eyad is 39, and we have … Amal Alanqar needs your support for Hope and Safety for Amal and He
In the blink of an eye, we awoke to a devastating barrage of bombs. The war had begun, and soon tanks surrounded us as the northern Gaza Strip was declared off-limits. We fled immediately from the north, leaving behind my husband who had to stay with his elderly father who cannot walk. The presence of checkpoints and the prohibition of vehicles forced my husband to remain in the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood in the north of Gaza.
My four-year-old son, Ahmed, suffers from diabetes. It is a constant struggle to find insulin injections and test strips. Weeks go by without being able to check his sugar levels, leaving me in fear of whether his levels are too high or too low.
Ahmed's condition break my heart
My children are the love of my life
I fled on foot, just ten days after giving birth. I carried my ten-day-old baby and my other young children, alone, fighting for their safety. A few days later, the northern Gaza Strip was completely isolated, leaving my husband trapped.
I cannot bear the panic attacks that Hoor suffers from the constant bombing
It was incredibly difficult to care for my children without my husband, moving from one place to another. I finally sought refuge in a shelter school in Deir Al-Balah.
My children have been deprived of their father, who used to provide all their needs. Their schooling has been halted, and their mental health is in ruins due to the war. My baby girl cannot get proper nutrition and is unable to sleep due to the constant sounds of bombs.
We share our room at school with 40 people, lacking water and sanitary supplies
My husband remains in the north, experiencing severe famine. Periodically, I manage to contact him, learning that he is still alive, but his situation is dire.
We want to escape Gaza and survive this tragic war, to build a decent life for my family, providing the basics of life: food, medical care, and a safe home.
Your donations can make a world of difference for us. Every dollar can help us escape this nightmare and start anew. Your generosity can reunite our family, provide essential medical care for Ahmed, and ensure my children grow up in a peaceful environment.
Hello,
I'm Amal, 33 years old. My husband Eyad is 39, and we have … Amal Alanqar needs your support for Hope and Safety for Amal and He
Your kindness and support mean everything to us. May God bless you for your compassion.
not that transphobes are ever saying anything interesting or insightful but it makes me insane when they see a trans woman who wants a uterus and start frothing out the mouth about how the sinister trans cabal is going to start harvesting organs from the poor and vulnerable... worsties do you have any idea how many trans men and cis women would be THRILLED to rehome their uterus to someone who actually wants it? all I'm doing with mine is complaining about it for a few days every month, I'd happily pawn that shit off to someone who would be happy about it. yes I am on my period why do you ask.
"Rehome": as if it's a hyperactive puppy and not an irreplaceable part of your body. Friendly reminder that humans are not Mr. Potato Head dolls whose parts can be swapped and customized.
Hello my friends, I am hamdi Ayyad from Gaza talelhawa I have sought refuge with you because of the devastating war that caused me to lose my home and our displacement from one place to another and I lost my children's future and there is a severe shortage of basic materials,I hope that you will stand by us whether by donating if possible or participating widely,Please help me 🙏🏼 🇵🇸 🍉
https://gofund.me/4de94fec
I'll share your story and gofundme as I'm unable to donate. I hope you and your family will be able to survive and rebuild your lives safely!
Everyone say thank you american indigenous people for cultivating corn, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, cacao, pumpkin, squash, and anything i missed. Makes life more meaningful globally
FISTFUL OF LOVE @thinkintrixxter - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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