>Go to a friend and ask them a very niche question. Rather than lie to you, they'll tell you "I don't know the answer to that"

Don't know about that, bullshitting is a thing. Especially online, where everybody pretends to be an expert on everything, and many even believe it.

But even if so, is that because of some fundamental difference between how a human and an LLM store/encode/retrieve information, or more because it has been instilled into a human through negative reinforcement (other people calling them out, shame of correction, even punishment, etc) not to make things up?