LLMs confabulate not hallucinate
LLMs do not confabulate <i>or</i> hallucinate. They predict the next word in a sequence based on correlations derived from a lot of training data. Sometimes that data happens to be structured enough to statistically generate a word that is fluent and corresponds to what we as readers understand as reality. Sometimes, due to the unclear nature of &quot;truth&quot; and the necessarily incomplete data used to train the model, the word or words that are statistically generated are merely fluent but do not correspond to reality.<p>The answer to &quot;What are LLMs but humans with extreme amnesia and no central coherence?&quot; is that they are not like humans at all, and only resemble them superficially due to our anthropomorphic tendency to infer a mind upon seeing fluent and roughly correspondent text.