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.
Well, if somebody thinks this, it’s kind of true isn’t it?
No. People think things that aren’t smarter than them are all the time.
Even if an ai has access to more facts and information you should feel confident in your human ability to reason through the data you do know, search new information and process it in the context.
If you think an ai does all this better than you then you need to try harder.
Nearly half of llm users are dumber than they seem
Only half?
Yeah thereabouts
For anyone wondering.
I’m starting to think an article referring to LLM as AI is s red flag, while them referring to them as LLM is a green flag.
Always has been
As far as I can tell from the article, the definition of “smarter” was left to the respondents, and “answers as if it knows many things that I don’t know” is certainly a reasonable definition – even if you understand that, technically speaking, an LLM doesn’t know anything.
As an example, I used ChatGPT just now to help me compose this post, and the answer it gave me seemed pretty “smart”:
what’s a good word to describe the people in a poll who answer the questions? I didn’t want to use “subjects” because that could get confused with the topics covered in the poll.
“Respondents” is a good choice. It clearly refers to the people answering the questions without ambiguity.
The poll is interesting for the other stats it provides, but all the snark about these people being dumber than LLMs is just silly.
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
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.
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 truth on topics that they’re presented with.
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”
For generations many relied on the nightly news to keep them informed. It was always a bad idea. Though the local media wasn’t as bad as it is today. Today for many of these people, propaganda outlets like Sinclair own their local media. And demand fawning of trump/demonizing Democrats. Even if they avoid all media. Their beliefs are formed from those around them that don’t.
The average person doesn’t know what a median is.
Take it up with George Carlin’s ghost 😉
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?
looking at americas voting results, theyre probably right
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.”
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.
Spout nonsense with enough confidence and you can wield unimaginable power. Am I talking about LLMs or president poopy pants?
Right? What the article needs to talk about is how very, very low that bar is.
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
Because an LLM is smarter than about 50% of Americans.
*as long as your evaluation of “smart” depends on summerizing search results
Have you asked the average person to summarize…well anything?
The equivalent would be asking the average person to write a cited paper on a subject in a month.
That doesn’t increase my faith in my fellow man at all.
You will believe what you want to believe.
Maybe even more.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin
And you know what? The people who believe that are right.
Note that that’s not a commentary on the capabilities of LLMs.
It’s sad, but the old saying from George Carlin something along the lines of, “just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize that 50% are even worse…”
Yeah but thats 50% on a bell curve. So think of the average person and that represents 68% of the population. Going 1 standard deviation lower 13% then lower is 2%. Numbers here are generalised*
That was back when “average” was the wrong word because it still meant the statistical “mean” - the value all data points would have if they were identical (which is what a calculator gives you if you press the AVG button). What Carlin meant was the “median” - the value half of all data points are greater than and half are less than. Over the years the word “average” has devolved to either the mean or median, as if there’s no difference.
When talking about a large, regularly distributed population, there effectively IS no difference
There might be no difference. In memes or casual conversation the difference usually doesn’t matter, but when thinking about important things like government policy or medical science, the difference between mean and median is very important - which is why they both exist.
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A joke is definitely casual conversation
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Mathematically, the difference becomes increasingly statistically insignificant as your population size increases. Sure maybe there’s a few niche cases where a hundred-thousandth of a percent difference matters, but that’s not even worth bringing up.
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The only reason any of you even bring it up is to try and sound smart in a pedantic, “ackshually” way.
Ironically your whole comment here is an elaborate “ackshually”.
This whole comment chain was me shutting down an “ackshually” with an even better one.
If you’re gonna be an annoying pedantic dick, you better be RIGHT, or someone else will be an even more annoying pedantic dick to you.
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Not in all cases. When I teach mean, median and mode, I usually bring up household income. Mean income is heavily skewed by outliers (billionaires), median is a more representative measure.
I guess that’s your “regularly distributed” bit, but a lot of things aren’t regularly distributed.
IQ is though
IQ is also garbage when it comes to the validity of what it claims to measure.
Fair, but you could just say “intelligence” generically instead.
They are right when it comes to understanding LLMs the LLM definitely understands LLMs better than they do. I’m sure an AI could have a perfect IQ test. But has a really hard time drawing a completely full glass of wine. Or telling me how many R’s are in the word strawberry. Both things a child could do.
Am American.
…this is not the flex that the article writer seems to think it is.
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.
A daily bite of horror.
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 😎
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?
