Interesting article. I've been thinking the hallucinating is really done by humans who think LLMs are actually thinking.

Semantics aside, it's not hard to see how LLMs "hallucinate" (producing wrong results) if you see them as powerful pattern matchers instead of thinking machines because there is no intentionality in their output. Humans think things with intentionality, and meta-cognition. We arrive at conclusions and decisions with grounded intention and knowing about why we know what we know. LLMs simply pattern match and create an output that looks like they were doing this, but they're not.

You can see this if you try to have a normal human conversation with them. At first the illusion works, but very quickly it shatters as you realize this text you are reading has no idea about theory of mind that it could have picked up on had it been a mind reading your prompts.