I don't see the difference between a human and a statistical model here. Surely in order to select an action to take, a person also has to apply some sort to th

I don't see the difference between a human and a statistical model here. Surely in order to select an action to take, a person also has to apply some sort to threshold on their confidence? E.g. how is a doctor deciding to amputate or not amputate an organ based on an x-ray different from a classification model for the same task? That problem aside, language models like Gopher are in fact generative, so no such threshold is needed! You instead sample from the implicit distribution.