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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[–] MrAlternateTape@lemm.ee 15 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

That is the problem with US adults. Half of them probably is dumber than AI.....

[–] Flocklesscrow@lemm.ee 2 points 10 minutes ago

The grammatical error here is chef's kiss.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 10 points 2 hours ago

That's called a self-proving statement.

[–] tad_lispy@lemm.ee 14 points 2 hours ago

If we are talking about American adults, I guess they might be right.

[–] jh29a@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 3 hours ago

Do the other half believe it is dumber than it actually is?

[–] Naevermix@lemmy.world 8 points 3 hours ago

Hallucination comes off as confidence. Very human like behavior tbh.

[–] Grizzlyboy@lemm.ee 30 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] Dayroom7485@lemmy.world 14 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] stochastic_parrot@sh.itjust.works 7 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Are you suggesting my 90's calculator is smarter than LLM's?

[–] Dayroom7485@lemmy.world 9 points 4 hours ago

Hard to compete with that 90s confidence 😎

[–] JackFrostNCola@lemmy.world 26 points 5 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'.

[–] MITM0@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago

Why are you even surprised at this point, when it comes to Americans ?

[–] blady_blah@lemmy.world 12 points 6 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.

[–] JacksonLamb@lemmy.world 6 points 3 hours ago

Memory isn't intelligence.

[–] LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] smeenz@lemmy.nz 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I bet the LLMs also know who pays tarrifs

[–] kromem@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

Wow. Reading these comments so many people here really don't understand how LLMs work or what's actually going on at the frontier of the field.

I feel like there's going to be a cultural sonic boom, where when the shockwave finally catches up people are going to be woefully under prepared based on what they think they saw.

[–] Akuchimoya@startrek.website 22 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 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 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.

[–] WagyuSneakers@lemm.ee 17 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Llewellyn@lemm.ee 2 points 2 hours ago

It's so weird watching the masses ignore industry experts and jump on weird media hype trains.

Is it though?

[–] fubarx@lemmy.world 43 points 12 hours ago

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

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 10 points 9 hours ago

They're right

[–] notsoshaihulud@lemmy.world 33 points 13 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.

[–] And009@lemmynsfw.com 5 points 10 hours ago

A daily bite of horror.

[–] Comtief@lemm.ee 15 points 13 hours ago (3 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.

[–] joel_feila@lemmy.world 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Bot even that smart. There a study recently that simple questiona like "what was huckleberry finn first published" had a 60% error rate.

[–] Comtief@lemm.ee 2 points 3 hours ago

yeah my analogy is not so good.. LLMs suck with factual stuff, they are better with coding or languages (Claude has been really helpful to me with Estonian).

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 24 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

They're not even that smart.

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[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 31 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

They're right. AI is smarter than them.

[–] Geodad@lemm.ee 48 points 17 hours ago (4 children)

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

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[–] Traister101@lemmy.today 7 points 12 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.

[–] Owlboi@lemm.ee 124 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

looking at americas voting results, theyre probably right

[–] jumjummy@lemmy.world 50 points 20 hours ago (9 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.”

[–] thegr8goldfish@startrek.website 4 points 8 hours ago

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

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[–] kipo@lemm.ee 10 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 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 13 points 13 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.

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 146 points 21 hours ago (3 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.

[–] Gigasser@lemmy.world 5 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I'm of the opinion that most people aren't dumb, but rather most don't put in the requisite intellectual effort to actually reach accurate or precise or nuanced positions and opinions. Like they have the capacity to do so! They're humans after all, and us humans can be pretty smart. But a brain accustomed to simply taking the path of least resistance is gonna continue to do so until it is forced(hopefully through their own action) to actually do something harder.

Put succinctly: They can think, yet they don't.

[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Then the question is: what is being smart or dumb? If acting dumb in 90% of life while having the capability of being smart isn't "being dumb" then what is?

If someone who has the capability of being 50/100 intelligent and is always acting 50/100, I would argue they are smarter than someone capable of 80/100 intelligence but acts 20/100 intelligence for 90% of their life.

[–] Gigasser@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 47 minutes ago)

Basically, although base intelligence/smartness perhaps has two parameters that make it? Effort and speed. Everyone can put in a bit more effort, but base speed may be baked in, unless one trains it, and max reachable base speed will depend from person to person. Hell if I know, we haven't really created a definitive definition for intelligence yet.

Edit Addendum: As for what can be considered dumb or smart? I agree, lack of effort can be considered "dumb". Though the word dumb is a bit broad. I guess we can say many people are, out of habit, "intellectually heedless"

[–] Mac@mander.xyz 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] ebolapie@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago

What's your preferred system?

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[–] Montreal_Metro 8 points 13 hours ago

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

[–] singletona@lemmy.world 37 points 18 hours ago

Am American.

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

[–] killabeezio@lemm.ee 1 points 9 hours ago

LLMs are smart, they are just not intelligent

[–] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 67 points 21 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.

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