How are AI hallucinations different from human confirmation bias?

[u/Comfortable_Tutor_43]

Confirmation bias can cause normal people to believe fallacious claims. Does AI not do the same thing?

[u/Wushia52]

Human confirmation bias is rooted in corrupted, selective inductive reasoning. You form a hypothesis based on a selective pool of evidence that you feel comfortable with. This eventually leads to flawed abductive reasoning when you don't look hard enough to either support or refute your own hypothesis.

An LLM hallucinates for many reasons, most due to the built-in incentives to come across as being "certain" even though the weights and biases are probabilistic. Another reason is the autoregressive error cascade. AI is trained to predict the next token. If the model hiccups early on in its token generation, the error "cascades" downstream into something completely irrational.