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Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are.
(imaginingthedigitalfuture.org)
"US".... Even LLM won't vote for Trump
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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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'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.
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LLM is proof that even if you're extremely stupid, having access to information can still make you sound smart.
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.”
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“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin
If we are talking about American adults, I guess they might be right.
That's called a self-proving statement.
This is sad. This does not spark joy. We're months from someone using "but look, ChatGPT says..." To try to win an argument. I can't wait to spend the rest of my life explaining to people that LLMs are really fancy bullshit generator toys.
Already happened in my work. People swearing an API call exists because an LLM hallucinated it. Even as the people who wrote the backend tells them it does not exist
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Given the US adults I see on the internet, I would hazard a guess that they're right.
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.
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.
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People need to understand it's a really well-trained parrot that has no idea what is saying. That's why it can give you chicken recipes and software code; it's seen it before. Then it uses statistics to put words together that usually appear together. It's not thinking at all despite LLMs using words like "reasoning" or "thinking"
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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.
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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
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.
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.
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They're right. AI is smarter than them.
Don’t they reflect how you talk to them? Ie: my chatgpt doesn’t have a sense of humor, isn’t sarcastic or sad. It only uses formal language and doesn’t use emojis. It just gives me ideas that I do trial and error with.
Am American.
....this is not the flex that the article writer seems to think it is.
This is hard to quantify. I use them constantly throughout my work day now.
Are they smarter than me? I'm not sure. Haven't thought too much about it.
What they certainly are, and by a long shot, is faster. Given a set of data, I could analyze it and pull out insights and conclusions. It might take me a week or a month depending on the size and breadth of the data set. An LLM can pull out insights and conclusions in seconds.
I can read error stacks coming from my code, but before I've even read the first few lines the LLM has ingested all of them, checked the code, and reached a conclusion about the necessary fix. Is it right, optimal, and avoid creating other bugs? Like 75% at this point. I can coax it, interate on the solution my self, or do it entirely myself with the understanding of the bug that it granted me. This same bug might have taken hours to figure out myself.
My point is, I'm not sure how to compare smarter vs orders of magnitude faster.
Are you smarter than a calculator?
They're right