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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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago

They're right

[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

A daily bite of horror.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 hours ago (2 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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

They're not even that smart.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Well yes, they are glorified text autocomplete, but they still have their uses which could be considered "smart". For example I was struggling with a programming thing today and an LLM helped me out, so in a way it is smarter than me in that specific thing. I think it's less that they are dumb and more that they have no agency whatsoever, they have to be pushed into the direction you want. Pretty annoying..

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

A broken clock is right two times a day I suppose.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 hours ago

LLMs are smart, they are just not intelligent

[–] Montreal_Metro 8 points 6 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

No one has asked so I am going to ask:

What is Elon University and why should I trust them?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 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.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

They're right. AI is smarter than them.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

The equivalent would be asking the average person to write a cited paper on a subject in a month.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 hours ago

Maybe even more.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 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.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 11 hours ago

Am American.

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

[–] [email protected] 105 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

looking at americas voting results, theyre probably right

[–] [email protected] 39 points 13 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.”

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Spout nonsense with enough confidence and you can wield unimaginable power. Am I talking about LLMs or president poopy pants?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 12 hours ago (6 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

You could buy a used one for only the cost of 2 dozen eggs

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[–] [email protected] 118 points 14 hours ago (2 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

This is why i don't believe in democracy. Humans are too easy to manipulate into voting against their interests.
Even the "intelligent" ones.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 13 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 58 points 14 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.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 14 hours ago

or they're dumb enough to be correct.

That's a bingo

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 25 points 14 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

[–] Arkouda 28 points 14 hours ago (11 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago (1 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

3d-printed concrete houses are already a thing, there's no need for human-like machines to build stuff. They can be purpose-built to perform whatever portion of the house-building task they need to do. There's absolutely no barrier today from having a hive of machines built for specific purposes build houses, besides the fact that no-one as of yet has stitched the necessary components together.

It's not at all out of the question that an AI can be trained up on a dataset of engineering diagrams, house layouts, materials, and construction methods, with subordinate AIs trained on the specific aspects of housing systems like insulation, roofing, plumbing, framing, electrical, etc. which are then used to drive the actual machines building the house. The principal human requirement at that point would be the need for engineers to check the math and sign-off on a design for safety purposes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

If you trained it on all of that it wouldn't be a good builder. Actual builders would tell you it's bad and you would ignore them.

LLMs do not give you accurate results. They can simply strong along words into coherent sentences and that's the extent of their capacity. They just agree with whatever the prompter is pushing and it makes simple people think it's smart.

AI will not be building you a house unless you count a 3D printed house and we both know that's overly pedantic. If that were the case a music box from 1780 is an AI.

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