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 "truth" 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 "What are LLMs but humans with extreme amnesia and no central coherence?" 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.