>ask it why

Always cracks me up asking the LLM why it said something like it really knows and won't just make up something plausible.

Scary thing is how similar we are in this regard. People confabulate and rationalize things the time, but it's especially apparent in people who engage in denial of illness (anosognosia) due to brain damage. One well documented example is stroke damaging the right hemisphere of the brain and paralyzing the left side of the body. Some will deny their paralyzed arm is paralyzed; Make up all sorts of excuses if cross examined / confronted with evidence of illness [0], or practically hallucinate their arm working, fail to notice it's not working etc. Video goes into like half a dozen experiments least. Mini spoiler: can ask someone with similar brain damage a ridiculous question "why did you just do x" (when did didn't do anything) and they'll confabulate an answer. Reminds me of split brain patients videos rationalizing why they did something (speaking left side of the brain) that was communicated visually only to the right hemisphere. [1].

Anyways, I was rewatching the anosognosia video the other day for the first time in like a decade and it really made me wonder how many evolutionary brain specializations it would take to more closely mimic human behavior in a machine.

- 0; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDHJDKPeB2A - 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfGwsAdS9Dc&t=347