I imagine rocky puts grace's amnesia problems down as a "probably normal for humans, they forget stuff all the time" thing for a while and it doesn't set in until maybe a year into the erid trip that, no, losing straight up All of your memories for several months is just about as concerning and unusual for a human as it would be for an eridian. and his immediate reaction is twofold: 1. "you. you were that brain-unhealthy for the entire time we were working together and you just. barely ever mentioned it? Why. Question." 2. [sudden recollection of every time he got short of temper and said something bitchy like "lazy human not know how own ship function" or "how grace forget location of basic controls question"] [curls up on the floor in embarrassment] "should have said something so I not spend two months making fun of brain injuryyy"
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.
I noticed that one of the authors of this paper is credited as “Shmargaret Shmitchell.” Apparently Google also asked a Margaret Mitchell to remove her name from the publication and that was her response
Book things that the movie left out (spoilers, obviously):
-Stratt's tablet, and the fact that she almost never even looks up from it
-Ryland Grace having a weekly steak-dinner-date with his former roommate's ex-girlfriend. This is one of his earliest recovered memories and is never mentioned again.
-Rocky's ventilator holes and clothes!
-What is essentially an "assembling the team" montage as Stratt acquires engineers, angry climatologists, and literally incarcerated mad scientists
-Bonus points to Ryland Grace vaguely wondering why he has to tag along to all of these character intros (it's because you're the POV character, babe)
-Grace almost killing Rocky when he tries to clear out his vents
-All of the talk about sleepy=stupid
-Eva Stratt going to exactly one (1) trial so she could show the judge her "I can do whatever I want" permit, and then sweeping out of there like a boss
if you see a Jabberwocky in an American National Park i cannot stress this enough you HAVE to report them to the nearest Park ranger. I know, I know, they fill human hearts with terror and whimsy in equal measure, but they are an aggressively invasive species in the Americas. Jackalopes are at risk of becoming extinct because during shedding season they have no natural defences against jaws that bite and claws that catch.
You don't have to worry about them killing it, they're actually endangered in England due to Victorian Era overhunting, so the British government's provided the National Park service with Vorpal Tranquilizer Darts so they can safely transport them to their native British Countryside where they can feast on borogroves and jubjub birds to their hearts' content.
Jabberwocks are starting to really intrude on the territory of the Snallygaster and crowd them out. Please report when you see them and help preserve our American monsters!
According to Andy Weir's Eridian biology document, Eridians are better multitaskers than humans will ever be, but the trade off is they're physically incapable of locking in. SO funny to me. Yes this species can build a diorama while simultaneously blitzing through mathematics equations and also partaking in intense gossiping, but they cannot do any of those things for longer than, like, half an hour without going crazy. Species of supercomputers cursed with the TikTok attention span.
Rocky mocks Grace when he says that Rocky is distracting him by starting complex conversations while he's Trying To Do Science. "Human brain have to stop activity just because talking question? Useless! One track mind!"
Then Grace is on hour six of his "trying to recreate skittles" hyperfocus and Rocky is like What The Fuck. Statement.
Yeah human brains can only do a single very consuming task at a time but it can do it for a very long time. The one track in our one track minds spans multiple countries. Persistence predators, babey.
It's commonly accepted in this fandom that humans have extremely fragile bodies in comparison to Eridians, but I think that's actually an oversimplification.
Because while Eridians are incredibly strong and tough on the outside, on the inside they are actually quite fragile:
They have no immune system, so anything that makes it past their enclosed carapace and internal heating will pretty much kill them
They have no natural defenses to radiation of any kind
In general they have very little organic matter so anything that targets their cells directly is quickly lethal
They are partially cold-blooded and live at a very narrow temperature range (about 20 degrees C)
They rely almost entirely on one, highly developed sense and are helpless if deafened (can't even remember the layout of a room)
They are completely helpless while asleep and can't control when that happens
They will forcibly become dormant after eating AND when badly hurt enough (their equivalent of going into shock)
They require more energy to function than humans do, and have very little organic matter to burn in the case of starvation
In contrast, humans:
Have an aggressive immune system and internal mechanisms for dealing with cell damage
Have adrenaline which allows them to temporarily ignore injuries and perform abnormal feats of strength
Are persistence hunters built for economy of movement and capable of extreme levels of endurance
Exist in a very wide range of habitats and on a diverse diet
Are very hardy in general, able to survive massive injuries, lack of sleep, prolonged starvation, and intense environmental conditions if given proper care
The quintessential example of this dichotomy between strength and endurance is the Going Fishing incident in the book: Rocky is able to survive and move in G forces that are killing Grace and to physically wrestle off the chair crushing him, but he collapses from his injuries almost immediately after. Despite being injured himself Grace then carries his 400lb friend up a ladder, is badly burned returning him to his atmosphere, and then proceeds to get some basic medical care, hype himself up on pain meds and keep working (albeit rather badly, lol) while Rocky forcibly sleeps.
The TL:DR is that Eridians are harder to damage, but easier to kill. They're like an rpg character with high armor and low health. I think Rocky would consider Grace to be very delicate at first, only to be blown away by how deceptively tough his friend can be.
I try not to fall into the "I never liked their work anyway" ditch when an artist/creator reveals themself to be a terrible person
BUT
a feeling I do have and will stand by is "While I enjoyed their work overall I did have some gripes that I overlooked out of affection and whimsy, but now that my loyalty is gone and my affection tainted there is nothing holding me back from enumerating my many grievances, to which the revelations of the creator's shittiness may or may not provide a new and infuriating context."
I shit you not, five minutes after having a conversation with a coworker about how neither of us mind small children being loud at work because they’re people too and deserve respect and they literally can’t help it because it’s developmentally appropriate , she started in about how much she hates teenagers
Bro teenagers are also people! How are you so dense? Teenagers are also children! It is developmentally appropriate for them to be loud (in a different way from a toddler, obviously).
I thought it was just like… cartoon villains who hated teenagers just for being teens but no!
Imagine a newly-arrived-to-Erid Grace, sealed in a small oxygenated observation room, lying asleep on a cushioned platform. So far, Rocky has been the only Eridian bold enough to put on a xenonite suit and join Grace in the room; other Eridian scientists are gathered just outside, listening to the alien shifting about -- in its sleep!!! -- and occasionally mumbling.
A particularly pessimistic and irritating Eridian is pontificating to the others, insisting on the highest degree of caution when interacting with the alien in any way, even if that comes at the sacrifice of speed in treating the alien's ailments. Rocky is furious at the implication of "even if that comes at the sacrifice of the alien, period", but silent, unwilling to express his counterargument at full volume and risk waking Grace. Still, he is almost vibrating with anger where he sits on the makeshift 'human-style' bed beside his friend.
"This creature moves about even when supposedly at rest! It's unnatural! Perhaps Rocky-hero only survived the journey here at all because he was safely on the other side of a barrier of xenonite and ammonia, out of this creature's reach. Who knows what violent urges and instincts are contained within that bizarre body?"
The collective attention of the gathered Eridians shifts to focus in on Grace's slumbering form.
As if on cue, Grace rolls onto his side, still snoozing away, and cuddles his whole body in a curve around Rocky's, in a shockingly-close mimicry of a parent [Eridian-cat-equivalent] curling around its [Eridian-kitten-equivalent].
Rocky is quite annoyed when the resulting chorus of [Eridian-"awww"-equivalent] IS enough to finally wake his human friend from his much-needed rest.
I also like to imagine a small subset of Eridians — maybe not bad people necessarily, but freaked out by a rapidly-and-suddenly-changing world and grasping for anything they can do to try and exert control over their circumstances? — jumping down Rocky’s figurative throat about him choosing to share so much potentially-sensitive information about Eridian anatomy and Erid’s culture, government, etc. with the first random sapient alien Rocky found floating out in space.
And then Rocky has to roll his figurative eyes and patiently (or not. Actually, definitely NOT patiently, that’s funnier) point out to those Eridians trying to scold him — the ‘random sapient alien’ freely chose to give ROCKY a massive data dump of information about the alien’s own race, including the precise location of the alien’s planet and instructions for how to build horrific weapons that could wipe out all life on that planet.
Sick and TIRED of the narrative that Ryland Grace lacked connection and was lonely and sad on Earth because humans are MEAN.
This was a man who was fulfilled by his career, mentioned that he had "multiple invitations" to watch the report from ArcLight, met with an old friend once a week (who does that?), went out for breakfast every day and enjoyed interacting with people there, made quick friends with folks when uprooted, and by all accounts was very social.
Just because he wasn't in a romantic relationship doesn't mean he was alone.
i like when eridians describe grace in other-worldly, incorporeal, eldritch ways. that he's beautiful and terrifying at the same time. a horror you can't look away from because you don't want to miss a thing.
you can never get a clear listen to him. his primary sense node is covered in "hair" and the part that isn't is hidden by two crystals that refract sound waves in a pleasing but disorienting way. he covers his body in billowy cloth at all times. not snug and sensible and unobstructive like eridian coverings, but loose and layered, draped and flowing.
the most clear part of him are his internal organs. because yes, the alien's carapace isn't sound-proof. his single heart beats insistingly in his core, his lungs exchanging gas constantly, his long digestive tract always bubbling and contracting. his thorax is packed impossibly tight and it's all moving and singing.
and it shouldn't be possible, with how fragile he is, for that internal pressure to maintain. how does the thin membrane of his external organ (another horror that sends eridians reeling) keep it all contained? his "skin" is so easily pierced, cut, bruised, burnt, how does he not split open under his own mass?
when savior rocky first arrived home and described the environmental needs of his alien, the scientists thought he'd made a mistake in his frantic panic to get everything out. it isn't possible this being lives at such low atmospheric pressure, at half the gravity, and in a gas that's nearly double the weight of ammonia. in a gas so dangerous, so caustic. and if it does then how is it obligately terrestrial like rocky claims? shouldn't it fly or float instead? (and then to see it in the water, learning that it can float or sink at will.)
and this alien has come bearing gifts that will not only save your species but launch it into impossible heights of technological and intellectual advancement. he has discovered the solution to astrophage and bred it to thrive on threeworld and translated his instructions into eridian. he has given your people the complete sum of his people's knowledge, advanced in ways the eridians can't believe and behind in ways that seem ludicrous. and he has given his life for your people to have these things.
he knows how your solar system was formed. he knows how the universe started.
his name means beautiful and generous and relieving.
