I think the difference comes from understanding. When we inferior, fleshy ones "make up" information, it's usually based on our understanding (or misunderstanding) of the subject at hand. We will fill in the blanks in our knowledge with what we know about similar subjects.

An LLM doesn't understand its output, though. All it knows is that word_string_x immediately follows word_string_y in 84.821% of its training data, so that's what gets pasted next.

For us, making up false information comes from gaps in our cognition, from personal agendas, our own unique lived experiences, etc. For an LLM, these are just mathematical anomalies.

AI is a very broad term that includes more than machine learning. Assuming you mean LLM

The differences are:

• it does not learn from experience like humans do. They learn by training, which is separate from conversation where context window is limited
• they only learn from text (thus name Language Model), so they do not understand other inputs like touch, sight, sound, taste, and many others
• they do not think critically, take all input at face value, particularly that LLM cannot corroborate input information with experience from real world

Also if you cannot tell difference between real human and AI it's only because your interaction with AI is limited to text. If you can meet it like a real human, it'll be obvious that it's a computer not a person. If the image is blurry/pixelated enough, you couldn't tell a car from a house, that doesn't mean cars have become indistinguishable from houses.

The term "hallucinate" is a euphemism being pushed by the AI peddlers.

It's a computer program. It doesn't "hallucinate", it has errors.

In all cases of ML models being sold by companies, what you are actually looking at is poorly tested software that is not fit for purpose, and has far less actual capability then what the marketing promises.

"Hallucination" in the context of LLMs is marketing bullshit designed to deflect from the reality that none of these programs have been properly quality checked and are extremely error prone.

If Excel gave bad answers for calculations 20% of the time it wouldn't be "hallucinating", it would just be broken, buggy software that requires more development time before distribution as a useful product.

AI uses data to "guess" the most possible outcome. LLM uses that to pick the guess that has the highest probability to "sound correct" to human, and it is affected greatly by the data it used to train.

One thing which is very different is that AI/LLM doesn't take responsibility of what they say. Depending on their training data, they may tell someone to kill themselves if the human has incurable disease and ask for possible treatments. It is definitely odd if ever happens in human conversation. But because you don't like the answer and don't think it is "correct", you will say the AI is "hallucinating".

Like talking to a lion, you can mimic a roar but it's up to the lion to decide if it sounds nice or rude...

From a theoretical perspective, it is entirely possible for code to simulate the activity of a human brain by simulating every neuron. And there would be deep philosophical questions to ask about the nature of thought and consciousness, is an electronic brain truly any different from a flesh one?

From a practical perspective, current technology simply isn't there yet. But it's hard to even describe the gap between how a LLM operates and how we operate, because our understandings of both LLMs and ourselves are honestly both very poor. Hard to say more than just... no, they're not alike. At least not yet.

what is the difference between current AI and the human brain?

My understanding is that: the fields of neuroscience and psychology are not developed enough (at this point in time) for anyone to provide a definitive answer to this question.

Anyone who claims otherwise would probably have to make assumptions, and may be talking out of their ass.

The only thing that can be said for sure is that the human brain uses both electricity and chemical reactions and seems to be capable of randomness, while the AI runs purely on electricity/code and isn't capable of randomness.

We don't know what consciousness is and we don't even know what life is so anything beyond this is pure speculation.

PS: Some of the answers here are demonstrably wrong, but I have learned not to get into arguments online anymore, it's better for your sanity.

Let's clear some terms. Intelligence and consciousness are separate things that our language tends to conflate. Consciousness is the interpretation of sensory input. Hallucinations are what happen when your consciousness is misinterpreting that data.

You actually hallucinate to a minor degree all the time. For instance, pareidolia often takes the form of seeing human faces in rocks and clouds. Our consciousness is really tuned to patterns that look like human faces, and it sometimes gets it wrong.

We can actually do this to image recognition models. A model was tuned to finding dogs in movies. It could then modify the movie to show what it thought was there. It was then deliberately overtrained, and it output a movie with dogs all over the place.

The models definitely have some level of consciousness. Maybe not a lot, but some.

This is what I like about AI research. We learn about our own minds while studying it. But capitalism isn't using it in ways that are net helpful to humanity.

That depends on how hardcore of a fatalist you are.

If you're purely a fatalist, then free will is an illusion, laws and punishment are immoral, consciousness is meaningless, and we nothing more than deterministic pattern matching machines, making us only different from LLMs in the details of our implementation and from the terrible optimization that evolution is known for.

But if you believe in some degree of free will, or you think there is value in consciousness, then we differ because LLMs are just auto-complete. They psudo-randomly choose from a weighted list of statistically likely words (actually token) that would come next given the context (which is the conversation history and prompt). There is no free will, no understanding any more than the man in the Chinese room understands Mandarin.

The whole conversation is so full of charged words because the LLM providers have intentionally anthropomorphized LLMs in their marketing, by using words like "reasoning". The APIs from before LLMs blew up provide a far less emotionally charged description of what LLMs do, with terms like "completions".
You wouldn't compare a human mind to your phone keyboard word prediction, but it's doing the same thing but scaled down. Where do you draw the line?

The difference is that a human often has to be held accountable when they make a mistake, so most humans will use logic and critical thinking when trying hard not to make mistakes, even if it takes longer than an LLM whose "reasoning" is more like a slot machine.

How a brain that works and learns (differently) since inception (creating new paths between neurons or strenghtening paths, adapting to every touch, sound, temperature, body position, smell and image it ever experiences) different from multiple matmuls that calculate an optimization path based on dual numbers (to get the gradient to descend) and different path seeking algorithms like ADAM?

Idk, but I think that it has a different way of learning and being, a child learns by being with others, it experiences things, their brains are wired in such a way to learn those things, they make errors and are corrected, so they learn to not make things up or they start to make things up on their own on what they learned, there isn't a model on what there is to be learned, there isn't a focus, just living. Machine learning algorithms learn by trying to predict the next token (not even learning wrong things and getting corrected, its like those kids who when they don't know something they just make something up, not having learned to be wrong), the optimal way to guess a color on a upscaled image, to denoise a image to match a prompt, etc. These are very different in my understanding.

I believe (in 5 trillion years) that if wires could be wired in such a way to reorganize themselves based on simply by existing, like our brains, not matmul*100 trillion, these wires being a "robot" brain and the "robot" just being and being teached by a society that sees this "robot" like any person we see today, I believe this "robot" would turn out to be just like a person. Our brain is physical, with nothing special about it, if it takes another form, like the "robot" brain, it would behave in the same way.

So, in my idiotic opinion, the scope of the thing, what is the relation with the environment, what it does, how it does, makes it different than what a person would do, be, etc. I'm probably 300% wrong, so yeah.

People just massively overestimate what goes on in a brain, I think. It's not magic. Consciousness, experience and understanding feel ineffable but they're just chemicals and electricity.

There's no divine and irreproducible spark, no reason that silicon and metal couldn't produce a system that does everything a brain does.

we don't let AI sleep. of course it's growing psychotic.

just turn the shit off for a few days and see if it helps. you'd want a nap too.

ai is way less horny.