I'm tired of this pseudointellectual reductionist response. It's not "literally by accident" when they're trained to do something, as if we are not also machines that generate next actions based on learned neural weights and abstract (embedded) representations. Your issue is with semantics rather than content.
Obviously "hallucinate" and "lie" are metaphors. Get over it. These are still emergent structures that we have a lot to learn from by studying. But I suppose any attempt by researchers to do so should be disregarded because Person On The Internet has watched the 3blue1brown series on Neural Nets and knows better. We know the basic laws of physics, but spend lifetimes studying their emergent behaviors. This is really no different.
I just kind of wish the behavior for "hallucinations" just didn't have such confident language in the context... actual people will generally be relatively forthcoming at the edge of their knowledge or at least not show as much confidence. I know LLMs are a bit different, but that's about the best comparison I can come up with.
Of course they hallucinate because we are training on random mode. +Since you mentioned 3blue1brown there is an excellent video on ANN interpretation based on the works of famous researchers who attempt to provide plausible explanations about how these (transformers based) archs store and retrieve information. Randomness and stochasticity is literally the most basic components which allow all these billions of parameters to represent better embedding spaces almost hilbertian in nature and barely orthogonal as training progresses.
The "emergent structures" you are mentioning are just the outcome of randomness guided by "gradiently" descending to data landscapes. There is nothing to learn by studying these frankemonsters. All these experiments have been conducted in the past (decades past) multiple times but not at this scale.
We are still missing basic theorems, not stupid papers about which tech bro payed the highest electricity bill to "train" on extremely inefficient gaming hardware.
Obviously "hallucinate" and "lie" are metaphors. Get over it. These are still emergent structures that we have a lot to learn from by studying. But I suppose any attempt by researchers to do so should be disregarded because Person On The Internet has watched the 3blue1brown series on Neural Nets and knows better. We know the basic laws of physics, but spend lifetimes studying their emergent behaviors. This is really no different.