AI behaves more like a brain than a database – cognitive science’s role in its origin story helps explain why

Cognitive scientists trace modern AI's roots to psychologists like Frank Rosenblatt and Donald Hebb, who modeled machines on brains rather than rulebooks, and later to Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams, who built the multilayer networks behind today's deep learning.

The authors argue this history matters because people still imagine AI as a database that looks up facts, when it actually behaves more like reconstructive human memory, prone to filling gaps with plausible nonsense, same as people misremembering a Tuesday.

That reframing is offered to explain why chatbots hallucinate and give inconsistent answers to the same question: they were never built to retrieve, only to generalize from examples.

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