xanderswillow

50s, enby and bi, AuDHD, living with effing ME/CFS. Submissive to my husband, not interested in anyone else. I will block you if: you're underage or have no age in bio, your blog is empty or looks like a bot, your blog contains hate or misogyny or any other asshattery I don't like. Happy to answer asks. My own writing is tagged with #willowswriting.

[the-big-mood]

At Toba aquarium in Japan, after closing time, some clever little otter pups help their grandpa tidy up their toys. As a reward, he gives them ice cubes

[chryza]

literally in tears at this video....such good helpers......

[beemovieerotica]

one cool thing about having an autistic dad whose special interest is underwater spearfishing is that when he catches fish he'll just call up a nearby chinese restaurant like "hi. i caught a fish. can you cook it and i'll bring my family by?" and they're like "yeah sure come on over white boy" and the fish is delicious.

[beemovieerotica]

it's worth adding that my mom is chinese and she always gets embarrassed by this. like she doesn't want to come to the restaurant with us. she doesn't want to be seen with the white man she caught plus the fish that her white man caught. everyone who works at the restaurant thinks my dad is awesome and compliments him + her for choosing him and we all find this very fun except for her.

[victusinveritas]

[thestuffedalligator]

I’m going to level with you. I have listened to The Devil Went Down to Georgia for most of my life. We were a country music household, this was a staple of my childhood along with Johnny Cash, Garth Brooks, and that one Chipmunks country album.

I have no idea what “Fire on the mountain run boys run/The Devil's in the house of the rising sun/Chicken in the bread pan picking out dough/Granny does your dog bite no child no” means and at this point I’m too scared to ask.

[dementian]

For once I can be of assistance.

Each of the lyrics comes from an old-time hickory song for fiddles, and is a lyric from that corresponding song.

"Fire on the Mountain" --> "Fire on the Mountain, run boys run"

Fire On The Mountain - Fiddle Player POV

"The House of the Rising Sun" --> "The Devil's in the house of the rising sun"

House of the Rising Sun

"Ida Red" --> "Chicken in the bread pan peckin' out dough"

Ida Red - Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys

"Granny Will Your Dog Bite" --> "Granny does your dog bite? 'No child, no'."

FTC #149 Granny Will Your Dog Bite

And for your furthered education, The Mountain Whipporwill.

Mountain Whippoorwill (aka How Hillbilly Jim Won the Great Fiddler's Prize)

[impossiblepackage]

this is the key part of the song, that a lot of people miss. people have this misconception that the contest between Johnny and The Devil is about who is the better fiddle player. but it isn't. its about who is the better fiddler.

in a time before things like radios and record players, every time you heard music was because there was somebody in the room with you playing an instrument. and many, many, many social events involved dancing, which requires music. so, if you're planning any kind of gathering in the american south or appalachia, you need to find a fiddler. and the fiddler's job is to play music that everybody knows and likes and can dance to.

the mistake The Devil makes in his bet with Johnny is that he misinterprets the contest as being about technical ability, so he has this big flashy song. he plays fast and impressively with a band of demons playing unfamiliar instruments in unfamiliar rhythms. he's definitely more skilled at playing than Johnny, and thinks he has it in the bag.

but Johnny wins because the contest is about being the best fiddler. the song uses these lines mentioned above as a shorthand for saying that Johnny is playing these songs. Johnny launches into a set of the most popular songs, played well, and that's what gives him his big win. A good fiddler knows all the hits, and can read the room to know what to play next. The Devil loses because he completely fails to read the room, and doesn't know the right songs.

[victusinveritas]

[a-krogan-skald-and-bearsark]

Doesn't help the Devils case that he played with a full band accompanying him.

Whereas Johnny played solo, so you could actually HEAR Johnny's fiddling.

[the-haiku-bot]

Whereas Johnny played

solo, so you could actually

HEAR Johnny’s fiddling.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[donnamissal]

[parasect]

Thanks, tumblr mobile, for unintentionally making this even funnier

[po-acus]

Just as I said, “is this ever going to load?” One gif loaded and honestly it answered my question perfectly.

[sternenhimmel-mond]

Together they create the full set.

[bartziefluff]

saw this again on my dash after reblog and…

[tuntematonkorppi]

tumblr black out poetry

[blastdamage]

the paris catacombs are 1000x more fucked up than i imagined

[blastdamage]

did you know the cops once found a fully functioning movie theater with a well-stocked bar inside the catacombs and they when they tried to go back later to formally investigate it was completely emptied out save for a note that read "don't search for us"

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

Underground french cinema

[npd-vriska]

my little bro is part of the catacombs community and yeah, it's basically a fully autonomous society! enough that when my bro goes in on a friday night, they don't come out until monday for work- sometimes longer if they took days off.

some of the rooms have fully stocked pantries with cooking equipment, some have movies like the one described above, some have books you're allowed to just take but people always put back- every day people bring things from the outside. artists often set up galleries there. there are rooms with mattresses and hammocks set up for people to sleep. one of the room is just a place where people leave shoes for the fun of it.

this is Known, it's not a secret by any means. the catacombs are as big as paris itself, and people live there just as people live above. it's wonderful when you think about it.

[npd-vriska]

A little update! My little bro is now my little sister. Please don't misgender her :)

[enbylesbie]

[jamjarblues]

i truly think that this recent trend of “if you relate to a post about a different identity than your own you are ~derailing~ and taking over the conversation” is incredibly harmful.

i recently experienced some pretty severe transphobic abuse in my workplace (children’s home) that included having food thrown at me, being called slurs, being told i was a pervert because i am trans. one of the managers talked with me afterwards and shared that he had had a similar experience as an Asian man. this wasn’t him derailing my experience, or talking over me, or making things about himself. he was communicating “hey, i know how it feels and how much it sucks. you’re not alone.”

THAT is what solidarity IS. i don’t know what it’s like to be Asian, he doesnt know what it’s like to be trans, but we both had a similar experience and we were able to turn a horrible experience into an opportunity for bonding and comfort.

stop looking at people’s attempts as solidarity as an attack. and hey, you never know - you could find an opportunity to grow closer to other people.

[niknak79]

[odysseusyes]

even with those four numbers there are countless possible combinations good luck with figuring out which one is the right one you punk

[eatsleepcrap]

*straightens calculator*

It’s pretty likely that it’s a four digit number, and as there are four digits chosen there, that means that there cannot be any repetition. This mean that there are:

n!/(n-4)! possible orders. As ‘n’ is 4 (number of digits available). 4!/0! which becomes 4x3x2x1/1 which simplifies to 24. That means that there are 24 possible combinations of codes. This would take you about two or three minutes to input all possible codes.

[crashingsunlight]

Unless an alarm goes off if you don’t get it right in 3 tries

[eatsleepcrap]

*straightens calculator again*

Kick the fucking door in

[the-brave-little-blogger]

well ‘technically’ the code is most likley 1970. statistically, a majority of people, when told to choose a 4 digit code will choose their birth year. and this key pad is obviously a few years old to put it nicely, thats most likley it. 

[everyonesfavoriteging-blog]

some sherlock holmes shit just went down over here

[the-neon-pineapple]

No, no, no. Don’t base your deductions of psychology. Let’s talk chemistry. When you first press a button, there’s more of the natural oils on your skin, and therefore it wears down the numbers on the keys faster. Obviously 0 is the first one, then. Try 0791 first.

Sherlock out.

[perks-of-being-chinese]

woah.

[panicrobot]

it got better

[twistedthicket1-deactivated2022]

and this is why the sherlock fandom could either rule the world or end it….

[ofthefantastic]

Close, but not quite, I think. People will almost always choose a number they can remember. What’s memorable about 0791? Try 0719 - a birthday, 19th of July. That is more likely.

[venatrix26]

Those deductions are great and all, but unnecessary.

The light is green.

The door is already open.

[party-gilmore]

And that’s why we have a John Watson.

[lotrlocked]

This is “top 10 favorite posts” level.

[moriartyfortheevening]

Omg, it’s actually on my dash! This post is like a fossil!

[oriocookie]

@hellsite-hall-of-fame

[insertusernameici]

[unicornempire]

I love that Leverage really goes out of it’s way to show us that just because you break the ‘rules’, it doesn’t mean you’re breaking the rules. Rules and laws and society are all made up, at the end of the day, and all you really have is your own moral compass and sense of justice; is this just to you? Is it right? Should it be OK for companies to put people in insurmountable debt for the rest of their lives just because our medical care is so expensive in this modern day and age? No law or rule should change what you know in your heart is right and wrong, and I think that’s the key thing that makes someone a good person in my eyes.

[theheroheart]

#there was a time when parker wouldn’t have noticed, #not because she lacked the capacity to care, #but because she had narrowed herself, #to stay alive she cut off as many unnecessary things as possible, #watching her get them all back, #is one of the glories of this show (via @seananmcguire)

[jack-the-bear]

Leverage hands down has the best character development I’ve ever seen.

[lets-go-steal-an-ot3]

This scene hit me like a brick. My parents were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt when I was 16 bc I’d had cancer the year before (my treatment ended up being free but the initial ER bills and such were not).

But somewhere along the line they just… Disappeared. My mom says they’re not being paid and they’re not in collections. It’s almost as if someone out there did…exactly what Parker did.

Ever since I saw this the first time, I’ve imagined it was Parker doing it. That she and Hardison had a free weekend and decided to take it out on a collections agency. That I was one of the lucky ones who got a little Leverage.

[gay-jesus-probably]

Okay but like yeah, that is actually a thing that happens, albeit not exactly like this. I don’t remember the exact process but basically there’s a booming industry to sell peoples debt - the business you owe money to sells it to someone else for a fraction of the money owed, wipes their hands of the whole affair, and now whoever bought your debt is riding your ass to get you to give the money to the. But it’s also entirely possible for people to just… buy up massive amounts of debt for pennies on the dollar, and then just. Forgive it. Because capitalism is a living nightmare, but the system is broken enough that it’s possible to exploit it for good sometimes.

Like, the main reason I know about this is because John Oliver did a piece on debt buying a few years ago, and ended it by revealing that he’d bought 15 million dollars worth of medical debt just so he could forgive all of it. Both to expose how broken the system was because some random fucker like him could buy millions of dollars in peoples debt with zero regulations, and also just to take the record for biggest TV giveaway in history.

[mikkeneko]

A charity where you can do this, right here.

Be Parker! Be somebody else’s Leverage!

[melyzard]

Reblogging for the website.

[nianeyna]

yes! if you want to help with the medical debt crisis in the US and have some extra money please donate to RIP Medical Debt if you can. They’re completely legit and really do what they say - you really CAN relieve an incredible amount of debt for the needy with even a small donation. I’m a monthly donor and receive a quarterly report of the debt they’ve abolished, and it truly is amazing. Based on those reports the average amount of debt abolished per person is actually I would say about $600 - which means, if you’re doing the math, that with a $6 donation to RIP Medical Debt, you can potentially pull one person out of a poverty spiral - maybe even one family. For six dollars. that’s a pretty good deal, I think.

[bethanyactually]

RIP Medical Debt is now called Undue Medical Debt!

Undue Medical Debt Homepage

Undue Medical Debt makes it easy for donors to make an impactful difference in the lives of those struggling with medical debt.

[weaver-z]

I heard this metaphor growing up, and in my case, it backfired supremely, because I went out into my neighbor's backyard where a rose bush was growing, and the one I tested had like 30 petals (it was yellow, but definitely a rose of some kind), and as a very logical lass, I came to the conclusion that you could have premarital sex AT LEAST ten times before your future husband would even notice something was up. Moral of the story? Test your metaphors on the weirdest and most neurodivergent child you know before writing your weird religious propaganda.

[orisnitsa]

[thetragicallynerdy]

[ID: the Bugs Bunny in a tux meme, edited to say “I wish all LGBT+ folk who live in countries where pride is banned, illegal, or unwelcomed a very I love you, stay safe, Happy Pride (red, orange, yellow, green, blue heart emoji). The edited text is in all caps, with LGBT+ in rainbow lettering. End ID.]

[otterducks]

hashtag pride month not study month

[writing-prompt-s]

You are working the gate in the afterlife and for the first time ever, something the humans built has shown up to be processed. You’re not sure what to do, this… entity shouldn’t have a soul, but here it is in front of you, freshly dead and awaiting the next life.

[wishingtoflylikeabirdinthesky]

It’s not as exciting as it sounds, working at the pearly gates.

Sure, it’s satisfying to send the hypocrites and the assholes to hell. And it’s nice to see the ones who thought they were beyond redemption walk through into paradise.

So yeah, it has its perks. But not exciting. I mean, after the first million souls or so they all blur together, you know? You never get anything new. Animals all get sent right on through automatically and there’s nothing other then humans in our jurisdiction. Oh sure, there’s life other then humans. But that’s no my department.

I keep tads on humans on my lunch breaks. You’re a damn fascinating species, better then anything your “television” puts out. Although The Good Place was a little too relatable, I’ll give you guys that.

Anyway, one of my favorite things you guys came up with was the Space Race. I mean, what a nail biter! And it was so tense up until the end. Pity about those Apollo one guys, though. But I heard they got a kick out of watching the moon landing when it did happen.

Course, that sorta died down after a decade or so. Don’t know why you guys quit going to the moon.

And then you decided Mars was the place to be and started sending out all those rovers of yours. Not nearly as exiting as going yourselves, but as you all like to say, baby steps.

The rovers were surprisingly fun to watch. For mindless robots, they’ve got a lot of spunk. So I’d check in every once in while, but mostly I watched Earth. You guys had figured out how to work memes and it was a very amusing thing.

I was half way through a shift when it go here. I have no idea why none of the others I processed mentioned the thing, but death is confusing enough I guess.

It shouldn’t have been there. I want to make that clear, by no law of the universe should that thing have had a soul. You humans are where closer to making actual AI then you are sprouting wings. And you never even tried with this! Its job was to collect rocks!

And yet there is was, beeping up at me.

It didn’t look like a human soul. Or any other form of life that I had ever seen. It wasn’t damaged at all, or even afraid. That was the weirdest thing. You humans are always scared shitless by the time I see you. But this thing wasn’t. Even a little. It was just… curious. Like that’s all I could feel from it. Pure wonder.

I blinked a bit before flipping through my files, seeing if it was a new species or something. I found nothing, of course. Those idiots over in records never give us anything useful.

So I did the only thing I could do. I asked its name.

Now, you humans have come up with so many ways to say the same thing that I’ve had to learn a lot of languages to keep up. The newest was binary, which I never expected to actually need.

It came in handy, since that’s what the thing answered back in.

01001111 01110000 01110000 01101111 01110010 01110100 01110101 01101110 01101001 01110100 01111001

Opportunity.

I remembered that name. It had popped up in new reports regarding a Mars rover that went out of commission, sending the final message “my battery is low and its getting dark.” before dying.

Humanity had cried over it for a solid couple of days. You guys really like personifying objects.

But I had dismissed it as just that. But here it was. Waiting patiently for me to send it On.

I could just opened the gates and sent it through and put from my mind. Make the thing some else’s problem.

I didn’t.

I stood, crossed in front of my desk, and put out my hand to touch the strange soul.

Opportunity didn’t feel human. Nor animal. It felt…. simple. Calm.

I could feel an awearness of the love its chief engineer had felt for it. The pang of missing the workshop back on Earth where it had been built, during long nights on Mars.

It had dreamed. Dreamed of humans making it to Mars and finding it. Of it’s engineer taking it home and repairing it. Dreamed of exploring Earth as it had Mars.

I could purpose, and curiosity in its mission. Lonely as it was, it never doubted its purpose or resented its lot in life. It got to learn, and to see what had never been seen. What more could it ask for?

I could feel one tiny spec of fear. Near the end of its life, it realized it would never go home. Never see Earth or its engineer again. That it would die alone on Mars.

And like all things with a soul it did not want to die. It cried and mourned and begged to live. It was alive! It had a home and it wanted to go home! So badly did it want to go home.

But there was nothing to do, of course. Even its engineer, whom it loved so dearly, couldn’t reach Mars and bring Opportunity home.

It had watched one last sunset, and sent one last message.

A goodbye. And a plea to be mourned, if it could not be saved.

I withdrew my hand and looked over the soul. It looked up at me.

For the ones that I send upstairs, I take the form of whoever loved them most in life. I guess in that moment, I was in the form of an engineer at NASA. Opportunity seemed delighted to see me.

“Welcome home,” I gestured to the gates that swung slowly open behind me. “I missed you.”

It beeped out a single phase, 01001001 00100000 01101101 01101001 01110011 01110011 01100101 01100100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111

I missed you too.

Before going forth, to explore the next life.

[jamradish]

The Divine Feminine, Sisterhood Wounds, and Why Submissives Need Each Other

Spirituality and self development have always been part of my life. I genuinely believe that healing and connection are the only ways we grow, and the only ways we make this world even slightly better than we found it.

Recently I attended a Rose divine feminine event, and listening to women speak about their wounds stirred something in me. Different details, same ache. And it inspired me to write about this from a submissive perspective

When I first explored submission,I thought the BDSM community would be different ,more open, more connected, more understanding. I walked into my first munches and events with genuine curiosity, wanting to learn, wanting to understand this new part of myself. But the other submissive women were distant. Unwelcoming. I reached out because I was trying to make sense of my own awakening, and I was shut down before I even had the chance to speak. I didn’t know if I was seen as competition, or naïve, or simply an outsider who hadn’t earned her place yet.

As I grew into the lifestyle, I began to understand the dynamic from the other side. New submissives would turn to me for support guidance, reassurance the things I once looked for. And then, just as quickly those friendships would disappear. I even saw my words, my thoughts, my ideas re packaged on instagram a new sub with 20k following as if they were original revelations while engaging in conveyer belt submission and collecting velcro collors all the social media gear and no idea.

For the first time, I understood why seasoned submissives keep their distance. It isn’t cruelty. It isn’t arrogance. It’s self protection. It’s the exhaustion of being pulled into someone else’s frenzy, only to be discarded the moment they stabilise or find a new source of validation. It’s the recognition that not every woman who reaches for you is reaching with good intentions, or with the capacity to hold what you give.

And yet I still believe in us. I still believe in women supporting women. I still believe that healed submissive women are the backbone of safe communities. Because when a woman heals her sisterhood wound, she stops seeing other women as rivals.

The BDSM world doesn’t magically erase our wounds. If anything, it exposes them. But it also gives us the chance to treat each other differently. To build communities where women don’t have to armour themselves just to belong.

I Believe submissive women can be each other’s safest mirrors. I believe we can learn from each other’s stories. I believe we can support each other without slipping into hierarchy or frenzy. And I believe that when we do, we create spaces where submission becomes something empowered.

A submissive woman who has done her healing work is not weak. She is discerning. She is anchored. She chooses who gets access to her softness. She knows the difference between surrender and sacrifice. She knows the difference between devotion and depletion. She knows that her power lies not in giving herself away, but in choosing where she places her trust.

Healing doesn’t make you harder. It makes you whole. And whole women submit from power, not pain.

[whisk3yteacup]

There are a few submissive women on this platform that I have learned bits and pieces from...none from fetlife, munches or events, which is very unfortunate. My experience in my local community was filled with submissives who were mentally unstable, there for all the wrong reasons and lots of abuse. Almost all of what I've learned as a submissive has been from Dominants. Which isn't all bad because I didn't have a definition that I was trying to fulfill...I let my common sense and intuition guide me. Sure I made mistakes, thankfully none of them damaging. It wasn't a bad way to develop, in hindsight. I have found "healthier" submissive connections here, even though their kinks are not my kinks. I miss submissive seeking so much. She always made me think. And, I don't find jealousy on this platform which is refreshing.

[katsdom]

My lovely friend @whisk3yteacup comments that she has learned a lot about submission from dominants. And I would add that I have become a far better dominant by paying attention to the writings of submissives and by listening well to those I know in person. All of us in d/s can do well to carefully study those on the other side of the /.

[musings-of-a-rambling-man]

You SHOULD have a tiny crush on a Tumblr mutual. It's good for the environment.

[katsdom]

I have a medium-sized crush on several of them.

[brofisting]

helpful tattoo reminder: they are technically Injuries so u have to eat a lot of calories drink a lot of water and sleep a lot after so your body can Heal The Injury

[brofisting]

another helpful tattoo reminder: the 24-48 hours after you get a tattoo your brain can not be trusted in regards to whether or not you should have gotten that tattoo, if you have somehow ruined your life, if it turned out ugly, etc. ignore that

[brofisting]

finally, while i am at it: always bring a candy bar and a sugary drink to your appointment for blood-sugar reasons (worst case scenario) or so you can have a treat (unilaterally applicable)

[brofisting]

this has been your friendly neighborhood haver of 19* tattoos (assorted sizes and placements)

*not totally sure here. bad at counting

[parasocialanxiety]

Can I just emphasize that not everyone reading this has yet encountered the information that injuries require food, hydration, and sleep? I think the way many people associate rest and injury is that you rest the injury itself to avoid making it worse, but overlook that the healing process itself requires rest regardless of if not-rest directly injures it further.

Also exercise is a form of controlled injury so that as your body heals it heals stronger. You also need food-hydration-rest for strength and cardiovascular improvements after exercise.

[katsdom]

I have no tattoos but am a long time nurse and a few weeks out from fairly major ortho surgery, and all of the above is SO VERY RIGHT. Injuries to the body, including intentional injuries like tattoos or surgery, do NOT just affect the local area. They affect your entire body. Healing requires huge amounts of energy, and that means you will be tired and need more sleep and more food to fuel the work of healing. I have a very healthy appetite and ate plentifully, but still lost 5lbs. in the first few weeks after my surgery.

[justalurkr]

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.