OpenStars

Not "clearly" at all. It could be as simple as someone new to coding doing it accidentally, probably using masking of their request origins (granted, this does not seem very likely at all...:-D).

Also, it forces the archive to expend resources that they could have allocated elsewhere - which would have longer-term consequences far beyond the short-term duration of the attack. Enough attacks like these could cause the archive to deprioritize something else that they had wanted to do, or drop something they used to support but won't be able to continue to do so in that case.

Or, why does a bully hit someone? That too offers purely short-term pain, until the next attack. Yet they do it anyway, and often it works to cow the victim into submission so that future attacks aren't even necessary, and instead the mere threat of one may be sufficient for the bully to get their way.

Also, does the entire rest of the world submit funding to the internet archive? I don't know anything about their finances, but compared to those of e.g. Russian disinformation sources or corporate profit-seeking, surely they are tiny in comparison?

The only thing "clear" here is that the attacker seems to be using the Might Is Right principle, as they are stepping outside the bounds of society to take on this vigilante effort by themselves.

Kbin: Not anymore, at least last I checked. I have an old account there that I left behind due to the enormous amount of technical glitches it kept having, and checking in on it recently (maybe last week?), not one of my comments has even a single downvote there - even older ones. iirc the "reduces" tab was still present, just entirely empty. (I was looking for a particular comment, but then while there noticed the effect was much wider.) Edit: I took another look, and I the only downvotes I see are from kbin itself (example post), so it seems to not be federating downvotes from outside of itself.

In the past when it did used to work, it also would not show downvotes from instances that it had server-wise defederated with, although someone can still get downvotes from personally blocking an instance, on a Lemmy server running v0.19.3 or greater, that the server itself had not server-wise defederated with. So there was always a very large gap there.

The reason I thought of this all was due to the OP title: e.g. someone could mass-downvote things on the Fediverse to attempt to control the conversation by de-emphasizing things that they did not personally agree with, but outside of moderator or admin reporting that offers a degree of trust behind it. Obviously that is its intended purpose, but I mean maliciously subverting that like have 10 accounts and log into all of them to influence a post.

About once a week lately I keep blocking some spammer accounts that randomly shill products or videos throughout the Fediverse, rather than wait for an admin to do it, but if an account(s) was more subtle and merely downvoted, then I doubt such a thing would even be noticed?

I should add that I respect some people's decisions if they want to be on a server that doesn't even record or reveal downvotes - that's fine bc it's their choice. But otherwise it is basically public knowledge, except as you say you need to fire up an instance of your own to view them, and then protect that instance from intrusion efforts even if you use it for nothing else (or possibly there is some API call, but I doubt that knowledge would be so easy to find, and for one thing it would have to access a database that has sent out past updates, not merely listen for new ones unless it had been running prior to the downvote event).

Anyway, I hoped people would see this post, and it seems that is happening, so this time the downvotes did not detail any conversation about the topic (with many tens-fold greater up- than down-votes), but if there had been sufficient number of downvotes delivered quickly enough... then how many of us would have even seen this, sorting Subscribed or All by Hot? So it points to a liability in the Fediverse, which at some point, someone somewhere is going to exploit.

Who would downvote something like this, without leaving a comment to explain why!?

Sometimes I wish I could see that info, in rare circumstances like this.

Culture constantly evolves - e.g. "the matrix" used to mean one thing, then after the film starring Keanu Reeves it now means something else.

Also AI itself used to mean one thing, as in general intelligence like a robot slave that has never performed a task before, but you tell it to become a maid and it teaches itself and becomes one just like a human would, but now the term has been coopted to mean the product of a training procedure. The managers at Google, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI, ChatGPT, etc. don't seem to mind or care about this bastardization of the terminology, as they borrow its power (from the movies and books and other works that have used "AI" in the former sense) while only paying lip service to actually putting in the effort to construct it.

And even with its greatly reduced formulation in the sense of an LLM, they still don't bother to train even that all that well - e.g. feeding it Reddit data that was intentionally corrupted as a result of Huffman's having greatly offended and stolen the communities from the same mods who originally built them. Yes they stole the terms, yes they are using it improperly - but what is anyone going to do about it? Words only have meaning by the consent of those who use them.

And if you are interested, I think you are fighting a losing battle bc of the way you are approaching it. Instead of acknowledging that others "know" the subject differently, and gently offering a nice perspective that they perhaps had not considered before - who isn't interested in historical tidbits about topics of interest, when presented in a captivating manner? - you instead came on strong, saying that everyone else is wrong except you, who has the secret knowledge. I know, it's true, but who cares? If your goal was to inform people, then do you think you succeeded? At least, I think you could have succeeded with a much wider audience. Ofc your words, so your call to do whatever you want with them, but I thought I would offer this perspective at least.

They’re not hallucinations. People are getting very sloppy with terminology.

This sounds like a temper tantrum, you blaming everyone else for how you feel about the matter. Again, right or wrong, doesn't it sound like that to you now that I've pointed that out? Well, again, it's your choice to think about that or not, but I did want to offer in case it may help:-).

Probably not about computers per se - like the Greatest generation knew a lot more about horses than the average person today - and similarly we know more about the things that have mattered to us over the course of our lifetimes.

What would get weird for us is if when we are retirement age - ofc we cannot ever retire, bc capitalism - and someone talks about the new horglesplort based on alien vibrations which are computer-generated from the 11th dimension of string theory and we are all like "wut!?"

fr fr no cap skibidi toilet rizz teabag

That said, humanity seems to not only have slowed down the accretion of new knowledge but actually gone backwards - children today won't live as long as boomers did, and e.g. despite being on mobile devices all day long, most don't have the foggiest clue of how computing works as in programming or even binary. So we will likely be confused in the opposite way as in "why can't you understand this?"

I liked that insider peek from Jenson - well I liked reading all of this, but especially that:-).

Now who is anthropomorphizing? It's not about "blame" so much as needing words to describe the event. When the AI cannot be relied upon, bc it was insufficiently trained to be able to distinguish truth from reality, which btw many humans struggle with these days too, that is not its fault but it would be our fault if we in turn relied upon it as a source of authoritative knowledge, merely bc it was presented in a confident sounding manner.

No, my example is literally telling the AI that socks are edible and then asking it for a recipe.

Wait... while true that that sounds like not hallucination then, what does that have to do with this discussion? The OP wasn't about running an AI model in this direct manner, it was about doing Google searches, where the results are already precomputed. It does not become a "hallucination" until whoever asked for the socks to be considered as edible tries to pass those results off in a wider context - where they are generally speaking considered inedible - as being applicable, when they would not be.

I am not sure what you mean. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence) says:

In natural language processing, a hallucination is often defined as "generated content that appears factual but is ungrounded". The main cause of hallucination from data is source-reference divergence... When a model is trained on data with source-reference (target) divergence, the model can be encouraged to generate text that is not necessarily grounded and not faithful to the provided source.

e.g., I continued your provided example of when "socks are edible" is a band name, but the output ended up in a cooking context.

There is a section on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence)#Terminologies but the issue seems far from settled that hallucinations is somehow a bad word. And it is not entirely illogical, since AI, like humans, necessarily has a similar tension between novelty and creativity - i.e. going beyond either of our training to deal with new circumstances.

I suspect that the term is here to say. But I am nowhere close to an authority and could definitely be wrong:-). Mostly I am saying that you seem to be arguing a niche viewpoint, not entirely without merit obviously but one that we here in the Fediverse may not be as equipped to banter back and forth on except in the most basic of capacities.:-)

"which contains false or misleading information presented as fact" (emphasis added) - the definition does not say how the misinformation was derived, only that it is in fact misinformation.

Perhaps it was meant humorously - e.g. if "Socks are edible" is a band name. Or perhaps someone is legitimately that dumb, that they believe that socks are genuinely edible. Or perhaps they were cooking up a recipe for maliciously harming someone by giving them intestinal upset. Or... are socks edible, if you cook them in an acidic substance that breaks apart their fabric?

If e.g. you got cancer and were going through chemo but someone came to visit you and gave you COVID and you died, was that "their fault", if they believed that COVID was merely a conspiracy theory? Perhaps... or perhaps it was your own fault, especially if you were aware that this has happened to multiple people before, and now you are just the latest casualty (bc you presumed that despite them doing it to others, they would never do it to you). Legalities of murder and blame aside, should we believe AI now that we know - regardless of how or why - it presents false information?

No, these "hallucinations" or "mirages" or whatever someone calls them makes them unreliable. Actually I think hallucination is a good name i.e. it cannot distinguish fact from fiction itself, therefore it cannot be trusted as it relates that info to you in a confident sounding manner.

Give me your traffic/money! (users/advertisers) 🤑 💰

-Google

AI hallucination is a technical phrase, with the definition:

In the field of artificial intelligence, a hallucination or artificial hallucination is a response generated by AI which contains false or misleading information presented as fact. This term draws a loose analogy with human psychology, where hallucination typically involves false percepts.

So it's like how a person sees stuff that isn't there, and similarly with AI.