579
Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are.
(imaginingthedigitalfuture.org)
They're right
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
579 points (96.9% liked)
Technology
66975 readers
4249 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Do the other half believe it is dumber than it actually is?
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.
load more comments
(5 replies)
LLMs are made to mimic how we speak, and some can even pass the Turing test, so I'm not surprised that people who don't know better think of these LLMs as conscious in some way or another.
It's not a necessarily a fault on those people, it's a fault on how LLMs are purposefully misadvertised to the masses
"Nearly half" of US citizens are right, because about 75% of the US population is functionally or clinically illiterate.
load more comments
(13 replies)
AI is essentially the human superid. No one man could ever be more knowledgeable. Being intelligent is a different matter.
Is stringing words together really considered knowledge?
If they're strung together correctly then yeah.
Does it have agency?
Then yss
load more comments
(4 replies)
Intelligence and knowledge are two different things. Or, rather, the difference between smart and stupid people is how they interpret the knowledge they acquire. Both can acquire knowledge, but stupid people come to wrong conclusions by misinterpreting the knowledge. Like LLMs, 40% of the time, apparently.
load more comments
(1 replies)
What a very unfortunate name for a university.
I'm surprised it's not way more than half. Almost every subjective thing I read about LLMs oversimplifies how they work and hugely overstates their capabilities.
No one has asked so I am going to ask:
What is Elon University and why should I trust them?
Ironic coincidence of the name aside, it appears to be a legit bricks and mortar university in a town called Elon, North Carolina.
I know enough people for whom that's true.
It's probably true too.