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.
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
The average person doesn’t know what a median is.
Take it up with George Carlin’s ghost 😉
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.
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.
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.”
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”
Consistency unimportant. Only follow important.
I’m sure Musk will add a “Roll Coal” option for Teslas soon.
Halt and catch fire? No wait, they already do that.
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.
Maybe even more.
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
Remember that 54% of adults in American cannot read beyond a 6th grade level, with 21% being fully illiterate.
Our education system in the USA is so bad. 😔
Good thing we nuked the Dept of Ed
People can improve literacy in adulthood if they try.
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?
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.
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.
Librarians went to school to learn how to keep order in a library. That does not inherently make them have more information in their heads than the average person, especially regarding things that aren’t books and book organization.
Librarians go to school to learn how to manage information, whether it is in book format or otherwise. (We tend to think of libraries as places with books because, for so much of human history, that’s how information was stored.)
They are not supposed to have more information in their heads, they are supposed to know how to find (source) information, catalogue and categorize it, identify good information from bad information, good information sources from bad ones, and teach others how to do so as well.
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…”
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
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.
Nearly half of U.S. adults
Half of LLM users (49%)
No, about a quarter of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are. Only about half of adults are LLM users, and only about half of those users think that.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin
"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’.LLMs don’t even think. Four year olds are more coherent. Given the state of politics, the people thinking LLMs are smarter than them are probably correct.
literally dogs are smarter and have more reasoning ability.
Than half of LLM users? Probably
Well, if somebody thinks this, it’s kind of true isn’t it?
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.
Memory isn’t intelligence.
Then asking it a logic question. What question are you asking that the llms are getting wrong and your average person is getting right? How are you proving intelligence here?
LLMs are an autocorrect.
Let’s use a standard definition like “intelligence is the ability to acquire, understand, and use knowledge.”
It can acquire (learn) and use (access, output) data but it lacks the ability to understand it.
This is why we have AI telling people to use glue on pizza or drink bleach.
I suggest you sit down with an AI some time and put a few versions of the Trolley Problem to it. You will likely see what is missing.
I think this all has to do with how you are going to compare and pick a winner in intelligence. the traditional way is usually with questions which llms tend to do quite well at. they have the tendency to hallucinate, but the amount they hallucinate is less than the amount they don’t know in my experience.
The issue is really all about how you measure intelligence. Is it a word problem? A knowledge problem? A logic problem?.. And then the issue is, can the average person get your question correct? A big part of my statement here is at the average person is not very capable of answering those types of questions.
In this day and age of alternate facts and vaccine denial, science denial, and other ways that your average person may try to be intentionally stupid… I put my money on an llm winning the intelligence competition versus the average person. In most cases I think the llm would beat me in 90% of the topics.
So, the question to you, is how do you create this competition? What are the questions you’re going to ask that the average person’s going to get right and the llm will get wrong?
I have already suggested it. Trolley problems etc. Ask it to tell you its reasoning. It always becomes preposterous sooner or later.
My point here is that remembering the correct answer or performing a mathematical calculation are not a measure of understanding.
What we are looking for that sets apart INTELLIGENCE is an ability to genuinely understand. LLMs don’t have that, any more than older autocorrects did.
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.
I bet they also.know who pays tarrifs
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.
