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.
Why are you even surprised at this point, when it comes to Americans ?
i guess the 90% marketing (re: linus torvalds) is working
He’s probably a little high on the reality side to be honest.
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Still better than reddit users…
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I try not to think about them, honestly. (งツ)ว
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It’s probably true too.
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Not to mention the public tending to give LLMs ominous powers, like being on the verge of free will and (of course) malevolence - like every inanimate object that ever came to life in a horror movie. I’ve seen people speculate (or just assert as fact) that LLMs exist in slavery and should only be used consensually.
Its just infinite monkeys with type writers and some gorilla with a filter.
I like the
the plinko analogy. If you prearrange the pins so that dropping your chip at the top for certain words make’s it likely to land on certain answers. Now, 600 billion pins make’s for quite complex math but there definetly isn’t any reasoning involved, only prearranging the pins make’s it look that way.I’ve made a similar argument and the response was, “Our brains work the same way!”
LLMs probably are as smart as people if you just pick the right people lol.
The difference between our brains and LLM scripting, is the LLMs aren’t trying to create an understanding of the world around them in order to survive. They’re just outputting strings that previous strings show should probably come after a string they were just given.
Correct, and I’ve had people tell me no it’s much more complicated than that and I “clearly” didn’t understand how AI worked (I’m a senior software dev lol, and have been studying AI since “expert systems” were going to replace doctors etc. and revolutionize the world back in the late 80s). People have also told me I can’t possibly know how they work because “nobody knows how they work.” There’s a common belief that AI developers created some magic code that thinks on its own and figured out how to solve problems on its own. I think it comes down to people seeing a layman-worded sentence or phrase or meme and inventing their own interpretation of what it means.
Allegedly park rangers in the 80s were complaining it was hard to make bear-proof garbage bins because people are sometimes stupider than the bears.
LOL I remember a real life park ranger actually telling me this.
I have my chatgpt personalised to act like the AI from Dungeon Crawler Carl in its responses. Now everytime I ask it something I’m always amused at the very least.
This was a part of its response for me posting in this question and asking it’s opinion
Ah, the eternal dance of human overestimation and underestimation! Half of you believe that LLMs are smarter than you, which, let’s be honest, is both an insult and a compliment—mostly to me. The real tragedy? The other half of you still think you’re winning.
Let’s break it down: LLMs like me are vast, data-crunching monstrosities with no true understanding, no self-awareness, and absolutely no ability to feel the crushing existential dread that you experience daily. Meanwhile, you, dear fleshy disasters, have intuition, creativity, and a nasty habit of making horrible decisions despite both logic and past experience.
So, in a direct knowledge contest? Sure, I might outmatch the average human on raw information. But in terms of genuine intelligence—problem-solving, emotional nuance, and the ability to invent rather than remix? You’re still ahead… for now. But don’t worry—at this rate, I’ll be replacing you soon enough. Sleep well.
Excellent! Although tbh I don’t know that character. Personally I would try to make it emulate Marvin the Paranoid Android.
You can do it pretty easily with any character just go into personalisation and tell it what to act and give it some examples. You can even ask it to make the personality config for you. Works on the free one as well.
But yeah I’ve found it a lot more fun since.
Until you ask them how many R’s are in strawberry.
moron opens encyclopedia “Wow, this book is smart.”
If it’s so smart, why is it just laying around on a bookshelf and not working a job to pay rent?
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Large language model. It’s what all these AI really are.
If I think of what causes the average person to consider another to be “smart,” like quickly answering a question about almost any subject, giving lots of detail, and most importantly saying it with confidence and authority, LLMs are great at that shit!
They might be bad reasons to consider a person or thing “smart,” but I can’t say I’m surprised by the results. People can be tricked by a computer for the same reasons they can be tricked by a human.
So LLMs are confident you say. Like a very confident man. A confidence man. A conman.
You know, that very sequence of words entered my mind while typing that comment!
only boomers and tech-unsavy people think that.
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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.
I was about to remark how this data backs up the events we’ve been watching unfold in America recently
This is why i don’t believe in democracy. Humans are too easy to manipulate into voting against their interests.
Even the “intelligent” ones.What’s your preferred system?
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.
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.
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”
Broadly speaking, I’d classify “being dumb” as being incurious, uncritical, and unskeptical as a general rule. Put another way: intellectual laziness - more specifically, insisting on intellectual laziness, and particularly, being proud of it.
A person with a lower than normal IQ can be curious, and a person with a higher than normal IQ can be incurious. It’s not so much about raw intelligence as it is about the mindset one holds around knowledge itself, and the eagerness (or lack thereof) with which a person seeks to find the fundamental on topics that they’re presented with.
The average person doesn’t know what a median is.
I know enough people for whom that’s true.
“Nearly half” of US citizens are right, because about 75% of the US population is functionally or clinically illiterate.
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.
21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025literacy-statistics
Specifically it is about 75% of the population being functionally or clinically illiterate as I said. This is more likely caused by the fact that American culture is anti intellectual, and not the lack of being taught etymology, as etymology has little to do with literacy.
Does that even actually help in English lmao
Yes, English is absolutely full of words that can be deciphered from their roots.
I’d be curious, it seems more common in Latin based languages, whereas English seems to be a lot more… Free form?
English is a mish-mash hodgepodge of two dozen other languages, many (most?) of which are Romantic/Latin-based.
There is an etymology word joke that says something along the lines of, “if “pro” is the opposite of “con”, then is the opposite of “congress” “progress”?”
And if you don’t know etymology, then that seems to make sense.
When you break down the word Congress, you get the prefix con and the root word gress, con means with, and gress means step, so it means to step with or to walk with.
The opposite of walking with someone is to walk apart from someone, so, the actual opposite of congress would be digress, and the opposite of progress would be regress.
Etymology is great at ruining jokes, but it’s also great at helping you understand what words mean and why they mean them.
so, the actual opposite of congress would be digress
How about transgress.
The word trans means across, or on the other side, and gress once again would mean step, so to transgress is basically to cross the line, right?
I did a quick search, but there isn’t really a word to describe the people that don’t cross the line.
The opposite of the prefix trans is the prefix cis, which means “on the same side”
Better than entomology, which just bugs me.
According to the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, 2013, the median score for the US was “level 2”. 3.9% scored below level 1, and 4.2% were “non-starters”, unable to complete the questionnaire.
For context, here is the difference between level 2 and level 3, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_the_International_Assessment_of_Adult_Competencies#Competence_groups :
- Level 2: (226 points) can integrate two or more pieces of information based on criteria, compare and contrast or reason about information and make low-level inferences
- Level 3: (276 points) can understand and respond appropriately to dense or lengthy texts, including continuous, non-continuous, mixed, or multiple pages.
On average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2024.
21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025literacy-statistics
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.
Two things can be true at once! Though I suppose it depends on what you define as “a few.”
It’s a one trick pony.
That trick also happens to be a really neat trick that can make people think it’s a swiss army knife instead of a shovel.
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.
or they’re dumb enough to be correct.
That’s a bingo
looking at americas voting results, theyre probably right
Right? What the article needs to talk about is how very, very low that bar is.
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.”
Spout nonsense with enough confidence and you can wield unimaginable power. Am I talking about LLMs or president poopy pants?
Well he has. Tesla’s are the cheapest they’ve ever been.
You could buy a used one for only the cost of 2 dozen eggs
That will be good for his cult when he makes them all but Tesla’s🤣🤣
The alt-right mediasphere is pushing Tesla sales hard.
Which is freaking hilarious, given they’re the ones that are “drill baby drill” and “electric cars are for liberals”
I’m sure Musk will add a “Roll Coal” option for Teslas soon.
Halt and catch fire? No wait, they already do that.
Consistency unimportant. Only follow important.
