495
Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are.
(imaginingthedigitalfuture.org)
What a very unfortunate name for a university.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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That is the problem with US adults. Half of them probably is dumber than AI.....
The grammatical error here is chef's kiss.
It's probably true too.
That's called a self-proving statement.
If we are talking about American adults, I guess they might be right.
It’s like asking if you think a calculator is smarter than you.
„It‘s totally a lot smarter than I am, no way could I deliver (234 * 534)^21 as confidently!“
Are you suggesting my 90's calculator is smarter than LLM's?
Hard to compete with that 90s confidence 😎
Intelligence and knowledge are two different things. Or, rather, the difference between smart and stupid people is how they interpret the knowledge they acquire. Both can acquire knowledge, but stupid people come to wrong conclusions by misinterpreting the knowledge. Like LLMs, 40% of the time, apparently.
My new mental model for LLMs is that they're like genius 4 year olds. They have huge amounts of information, and yet have little to no wisdom as to what to do with it or how to interpret it.
"Half of LLM users " beleive this. Which is not to say that people who understand how flawed LLMs are, or what their actual function is, do not use LLMs and therefore arent i cluded in this statistic?
This is kinda like saying '60% of people who pay for their daily horoscope beleive it is an accurate prediction'.
I suppose some of that comes down to the personal understanding of what "smart" is.
I guess you could call some person, that doesn't understand a topic, but still manages to sound reasonable when talking about it, and might even convince people that they actually have a deep understanding of that topic, "smart", in a kind of "smart imposter".
Do the other half believe it is dumber than it actually is?
You say this like this is wrong.
Think of a question that you would ask an average person and then think of what the LLM would respond with. The vast majority of the time the llm would be more correct than most people.
A good example is the post on here about tax brackets. Far more Republicans didn't know how tax brackets worked than Democrats. But every mainstream language model would have gotten the answer right.
I bet the LLMs also know who pays tarrifs
I had to tell a bunch of librarians that LLMs are literally language models made to mimic language patterns, and are not made to be factually correct. They understood it when I put it that way, but librarians are supposed to be "information professionals". If they, as a slightly better trained subset of the general public, don't know that, the general public has no hope of knowing that.
Librarians went to school to learn how to keep order in a library. That does not inherently make them have more information in their heads than the average person, especially regarding things that aren't books and book organization.
It's so weird watching the masses ignore industry experts and jump on weird media hype trains. This must be how doctors felt in Covid.
It's so weird watching the masses ignore industry experts and jump on weird media hype trains.
Is it though?
I'm the expert in this situation and I'm getting tired explaining to Jr Engineers and laymen that it is a media hype train.
I worked on ML projects before they got rebranded as AI. I get to sit in the room when these discussion happen with architects and actual leaders. This is Hype. Anyone who tells you other wise is lying or selling you something.
I see how that is a hype train, and I also work with machine learning (though I'm far from an expert), but I'm not convinced these things are not getting intelligent. I know what their problems are, but I'm not sure whether the human brain works the same way, just (yet) more effective.
That is, we have visual information, and some evolutionary BIOS, while LLMs have to read the whole internet and use a power plant to function - but what if our brains are just the same bullshit generators, we are just unaware of it?
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“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin
I'm 100% certain that LLMs are smarter than half of Americans. What I'm not so sure about is that the people with the insight to admit being dumber than an LLM are the ones who really are.
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They're right
Why are you even surprised at this point, when it comes to Americans ?