Comment by miki123211

The difference is the kind of hallucinations you get.

Traditional OCR is more likely to skip characters, or replace them with similar -looking ones, so you often get AL or A1 instead of AI for example. In other words, traditional spelling mistakes. LLMs can do anything from hallucinating new paragraphs to slightly changing the meaning of a sentence. The text is still grammatically correct, it makes sense in the context, except that it's not what the document actually said.

I once gave it a hand-written list of words and their definitions and asked it to turn that into flashcards (a json array with "word" and "definition"). Traditional OCR struggled with this text, the results were extremely low-quality, badly formatted but still somewhat understandable. The few LLMs I've tried either straight up refused to do it, or gave me the correct list of words, but entirely hallucinated the definitions.