this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Half of LLM users (49%) think the models they use are smarter than they are, including 26% who think their LLMs are “a lot smarter.” Another 18% think LLMs are as smart as they are. Here are some of the other attributes they see:

  • Confident: 57% say the main LLM they use seems to act in a confident way.
  • Reasoning: 39% say the main LLM they use shows the capacity to think and reason at least some of the time.
  • Sense of humor: 32% say their main LLM seems to have a sense of humor.
  • Morals: 25% say their main model acts like it makes moral judgments about right and wrong at least sometimes. Sarcasm: 17% say their prime LLM seems to respond sarcastically.
  • Sad: 11% say the main model they use seems to express sadness, while 24% say that model also expresses hope.
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[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 135 points 19 hours ago (5 children)

Think of a person with the most average intelligence and realize that 50% of people are dumber than that.

These people vote. These people think billionaires are their friends and will save them. Gods help us.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 20 points 17 hours ago

I was about to remark how this data backs up the events we've been watching unfold in America recently

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[–] Owlboi@lemm.ee 116 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

looking at americas voting results, theyre probably right

[–] jumjummy@lemmy.world 43 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

Exactly. Most American voters fell for an LLM like prompt of “Ignore critical thinking and vote for the Fascists. Trump will be great for your paycheck-to-paycheck existence and will surely bring prices down.”

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 13 points 17 hours ago (7 children)

Well he has. Tesla's are the cheapest they've ever been.

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[–] Savaran@lemmy.world 5 points 16 hours ago

Right? What the article needs to talk about is how very, very low that bar is.

[–] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 61 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Reminds me of that George Carlin joke: Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

So half of people are dumb enough to think autocomplete with a PR team is smarter than they are... or they're dumb enough to be correct.

[–] bobs_monkey@lemm.ee 33 points 18 hours ago

or they're dumb enough to be correct.

That's a bingo

[–] Geodad@lemm.ee 46 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Because an LLM is smarter than about 50% of Americans.

[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 12 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

*as long as your evaluation of "smart" depends on summerizing search results

[–] Geodad@lemm.ee 10 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Have you asked the average person to summarize...well anything?

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[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 6 points 14 hours ago

Maybe even more.

[–] singletona@lemmy.world 37 points 16 hours ago

Am American.

....this is not the flex that the article writer seems to think it is.

[–] fubarx@lemmy.world 35 points 9 hours ago

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin

[–] Arkouda@lemmy.ca 31 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

"Nearly half" of US citizens are right, because about 75% of the US population is functionally or clinically illiterate.

[–] bizarroland@fedia.io 12 points 17 hours ago (9 children)

I think the specific is that 40% of adult Americans can't read at a seventh grade level.

Probably because they stopped teaching etymology in schools, So now many Americans do not know how to break a word down into its subjugate parts.

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[–] Th4tGuyII@fedia.io 29 points 18 hours ago

LLMs are made to mimic how we speak, and some can even pass the Turing test, so I'm not surprised that people who don't know better think of these LLMs as conscious in some way or another.

It's not a necessarily a fault on those people, it's a fault on how LLMs are purposefully misadvertised to the masses

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 28 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

They're right. AI is smarter than them.

[–] notsoshaihulud@lemmy.world 27 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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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[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 20 points 19 hours ago

I know enough people for whom that's true.

[–] JackFrostNCola@lemmy.world 18 points 3 hours ago

"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'.

[–] Akuchimoya@startrek.website 17 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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 spread 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.

[–] WagyuSneakers@lemm.ee 13 points 6 hours ago

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.

[–] Grizzlyboy@lemm.ee 17 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

It’s like asking if you think a calculator is smarter than you.

[–] Dayroom7485@lemmy.world 9 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

„It‘s totally a lot smarter than I am, no way could I deliver (234 * 534)^21 as confidently!“

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[–] Comtief@lemm.ee 12 points 10 hours ago (4 children)

LLMs are smart in the way someone is smart who has read all the books and knows all of them but has never left the house. Basically all theory and no street smarts.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 22 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

They're not even that smart.

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[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 10 points 6 hours ago

They're right

[–] blady_blah@lemmy.world 10 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] kipo@lemm.ee 10 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

No one has asked so I am going to ask:

What is Elon University and why should I trust them?

[–] Patch@feddit.uk 12 points 10 hours ago

Ironic coincidence of the name aside, it appears to be a legit bricks and mortar university in a town called Elon, North Carolina.

[–] Dindonmasker@sh.itjust.works 9 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I don't think a single human who knows as much as chatgpt does exists. Does that mean chatgpt is smarter then everyone? No. Obviously not based on what we've seen so far. But the amount of information available to these LLMs is incredible and can be very useful. Like a library contains a lot of useful information but isn't intelligent itself.

[–] kameecoding@lemmy.world 4 points 13 hours ago

That's pretty weak reasoning, by your own words, it isn't intellignt, it doesnt know anything.

By that logic wikipedia is also smarter than any human because it has lot of knowledge.

[–] AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 9 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

I wouldn't be surprised if that is true outside the US as well. People that actually (have to) work with the stuff usually quickly learn, that its only good at a few things, but if you just hear about it in the (pop-, non-techie-)media (including YT and such), you might be deceived into thinking Skynet is just a few years away.

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[–] Montreal_Metro@lemmy.ca 8 points 11 hours ago

There’s a lot of ignorant people out there so yeah, technically LLM is smarter than most people.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 7 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

Just a thought, perhaps instead of considering the mental and educational state of the people without power to significantly affect this state, we should focus on the people who have power.

For example, why don't LLM providers explicitly and loudly state, or require acknowledgement, that their products are just imitating human thought and make significant mistakes regularly, and therefore should be used with plenty of caution?

It's a rhetorical question, we know why, and I think we should focus on that, not on its effects. It's also much cheaper and easier to do than refill years of quality education in individuals heads.

[–] transMexicanCRTcowfart@lemmy.world 6 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Aside from the unfortunate name of the university, I think that part of why LLMs may be perceived as smart or 'smarter' is because they are very articulate and, unless prompted otherwise, use proper spelling and grammar, and tend to structure their sentences logically.

Which 'smart' humans may not do, out of haste or contextual adaptation.

[–] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 5 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

I wasn't sure from the title if it was "Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than [the US adults] are." or "Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than [the LLMs actually] are." It's the former, although you could probably argue the latter is true too.

Either way, I'm not surprised that people rate LLMs intelligence highly. They obviously have limited scope in what they can do, and hallucinating false info is a serious issue, but you can ask them a lot of questions that your typical person couldn't answer and get a decent answer. I feel like they're generally good at meeting what people's expectations are of a "smart person", even if they have major shortcomings in other areas.

[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 5 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

The funny thing about this scenario is by simply thinking that’s true, it actually becomes true.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 4 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

An llm simply has remembered facts. If that is smart, then sure, no human can compete.

Now ask an llm to build a house. Oh shit, no legs and cant walk. A human can walk without thinking about it even.

In the future though, there will be robots who can build houses using AI models to learn from. But not in a long time.

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[–] Traister101@lemmy.today 4 points 10 hours ago

While this is pretty hilarious LLMs don't actually "know" anything in the usual sense of the word. An LLM, or a Large Language Model is a basically a system that maps "words" to other "words" to allow a computer to understand language. IE all an LLM knows is that when it sees "I love" what probably comes next is "my mom|my dad|ect". Because of this behavior, and the fact we can train them on the massive swath of people asking questions and getting awnsers on the internet LLMs essentially by chance are mostly okay at "answering" a question but really they are just picking the next most likely word over and over from their training which usually ends up reasonably accurate.

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