I asked Gemini the other day to research and summarise the pinout configuration for CANbus outputs on a list of hardware products, and to provide references for each. It came back with a table summarising pin outs for each of the eight products, and a URL reference for each.

Of the 8, 3 were wrong, and the references contained no information about pin outs whatsoever.

That kind of hallucination is, to me, entirely different than what a human researcher would ever do. They would say “for these three I couldn’t find pinouts” or perhaps misread a document and mix up pinouts from one model for another.. they wouldn’t make up pinouts and reference a document that had no such information in it.

Of course humans also imagine things, misremember etc, but what the LLMs are doing is something entirely different, is it not?