[josecodea]

> state it as confidently incorrect

It's funny for me to read this. They don't exhibit "confidence". You are just getting the most accurate text that it can produce. Of course, the training data doesn't contain "I don't know" for questions, that would be really bad training data! If you are getting "attitudes", it would be because you are triggering some kind of dialogue-esque data with your prompts (or the system prompt might be doing that).

Expecting the LLM to say "sorry I don't know" would be like expecting google search to return "we found some pages but deemed them wrong, so we won't show you any".