I think you’re giving a glorified encyclopedia too much credit. The difference between us and “AI” is that we can approach knowledge from a problem solving position. We do approximate the laws of physics, but we don’t blindly take our beliefs and run with it. We put we come up with a theory that then gets rigorously criticized, then come up with ways to test that theory, then be critical of the test results and eventually we come to consensus that based on our understandings that thing is true. We’ve built entire frameworks to reduce our “hallucinations”. The reason we even know we have blind spots is because we’re so critical of our own “hallucinations” that we end up deliberately looking for our blind spots.
But the “AI” doesn’t do that. It can’t do that. The “AI” can’t solve problems, it can’t be critical of itself or what information its giving out. All our current “AI” can do is word vomit itself into a reasonable answer. Sometimes the word vomit is factually correct, sometimes it’s just nonsense.
You are right that theoretically hallucinations cannot be solved, but in practicality we ourselves have come up with solutions to minimize it. We could probably do something similar with “AI” but not when the AI is just a LLM that fumbles into sentences.
It doesn’t need to verify reality, it needs to be internally consistent and it’s not.
For example I was setting up logging pipeline and one of the filters didn’t work. There was seemingly nothing wrong with configuration itself and after some more tests with dummy data I was able to get it working, but it still didn’t work with the actual input data. So I have the working dummy example and the actual configuration to chatGPT and asked why the actual configuration doesn’t work. After some prompts going over what I had already tried it ended up giving me the exact same configuration I had presented as the problem. Humans wouldn’t (or at least shouldn’t) make that error because it would be internally inconsistent, the problem statement can’t be the solution.
But the AI doesn’t have internal consistency because it doesn’t really think. It’s not making sure what it’s saying is logical based on the information it knows, it’s not trying to make assumptions to solve a problem, it can’t even deduce that something true is actuality true. All it can do is predict what we would perceive as the answer.