The common theme seems the low certainty about facts – a historical event that is wrongly memorized by a human or the Large Language Model that wrongly extrapolates from otherwise secure knowledge. But is there even more?
Yann Le Cun is being quoted at IEEE Spectrum
“Large language models have no idea of the underlying reality that language describes,” he said, adding that most human knowledge is nonlinguistic. “Those systems generate text that sounds fine, grammatically, semantically, but they don’t really have some sort of objective other than just satisfying statistical consistency with the prompt.”
Humans operate on a lot of knowledge that is never written down, such as customs, beliefs, or practices within a community that are acquired through observation or experience. And a skilled craftsperson may have tacit knowledge of their craft that is never written down.
I think “hallucination” is way too much an anthropomorphic concept – some LLM output is basically statistical nonsense (although I wouldn’t go as far as Michael Townsen Hicks…). Reasons for these kind of errors are manifold -reference divergence may be already in the data used for learning – data created by bots, conspiracy followers or even fraud science. The error may also originate from encoding or decoding routines.
I couldn’t find any further analogy with wrong human memory recall except the possibility that also human memory is influenced by probability as well. Otgar 2022 cites Calado 2020
The issue of whether repeated events can be implanted in memory has recently been addressed by Calado and colleagues (2020). In their experiment, they falsely told adult participants that they lost their cuddling toy several times while control participants were told that they only lost it once. Strikingly, they found that repeated false events were as easily inserted in memory as suggesting that the event happened once. So, this study not only showed that repeated events can be implanted, it raised doubts about the idea that repeated events might be harder to implant than single events