> Some people point at LLMs confabulating, as if this wasn’t something humans are already widely known for doing.

I think we need to start rejecting anthropomorphic statements like this out of hand. They are lazy, typically wrong, and are always delivered as a dismissive defense of LLM failure modes. Anything can be anthropomorphized, and it's always problematic to do so - that's why the word exists.

This rhetorical technique always follows the form of "this LLM behavior can be analogized in terms of some human behavior, thus it follows that LLMs are human-like" which then opens the door to unbounded speculation that draws on arbitrary aspects of human nature and biology to justify technical reasoning.

In this case, you've deliberately conflated a technical term of art (LLM confabulation) with the the concept of human memory confabulation and used that as a foundation to argue that confabulation is thus inherent to intelligence. There is a lot that's wrong with this reasoning, but the most obvious is that it's a massive category error. "Confabulation" in LLMs and "confabulation" in humans have basically nothing in common, they are comparable only in an extremely superficial sense. To then go on to suggest that confabulation might be inherent to intelligence isn't even really a coherent argument because you've created ambiguity in the meaning of the word confabulate.

>this LLM behavior can be analogized in terms of some human behavior, thus it follows that LLMs are human-like

No, the argument is "this behavior is similar enough to human behavior that using it as evidence against <claim regarding LLM capability that humans have> is specious"

>"Confabulation" in LLMs and "confabulation" in humans have basically nothing in common

I don't know why you think this. They seem to have a lot in common. I call it sensible nonsense. Humans are prone to this when self-reflective neural circuits break down. LLMs are characterized by a lack of self-reflective information. When critical input is missing, the algorithm will craft a narrative around the available, but insufficient information resulting in sensible nonsense (e.g. neural disorders such as somatoparaphrenia)