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Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are.

imaginingthedigitalfuture.org

Close encounters of the AI kind - Imagining the Digital Future Center

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.
218 comments

  • 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

  • "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'.

  • If we are talking about American adults, I guess they might be right.

  • 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.

  • Given the US adults I see on the internet, I would hazard a guess that they're right.

  • Just a thought, perhaps instead of considering the mental and educational state of the people without power to significantly affect this state, we should focus on the people who have power.

    For example, why don't LLM providers explicitly and loudly state, or require acknowledgement, that their products are just imitating human thought and make significant mistakes regularly, and therefore should be used with plenty of caution?

    It's a rhetorical question, we know why, and I think we should focus on that, not on its effects. It's also much cheaper and easier to do than refill years of quality education in individuals heads.

  • Aside from the unfortunate name of the university, I think that part of why LLMs may be perceived as smart or 'smarter' is because they are very articulate and, unless prompted otherwise, use proper spelling and grammar, and tend to structure their sentences logically.

    Which 'smart' humans may not do, out of haste or contextual adaptation.

  • I wasn't sure from the title if it was "Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than [the US adults] are." or "Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than [the LLMs actually] are." It's the former, although you could probably argue the latter is true too.

    Either way, I'm not surprised that people rate LLMs intelligence highly. They obviously have limited scope in what they can do, and hallucinating false info is a serious issue, but you can ask them a lot of questions that your typical person couldn't answer and get a decent answer. I feel like they're generally good at meeting what people's expectations are of a "smart person", even if they have major shortcomings in other areas.

218 comments