Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are.
Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are.
The increasingly human-like way people are engaging with language models Read the full report | Download this report (PDF) | Survey methdology and topline (PDF) March 12, 2025 Half of...
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.
Half of all voters voted for Trump. So an LLM might be smarter than them. Even a bag of pea gravel might be.
The average literacy level is around that of a sixth grader.
This tracks
LLM is proof that even if you're extremely stupid, having access to information can still make you sound smart.
I believe LLMs are smarter than half of US adults
That is the problem with US adults. Half of them probably is dumber than AI.....
If we are talking about American adults, I guess they might be right.
Hallucination comes off as confidence. Very human like behavior tbh.
Do the other half believe it is dumber than it actually is?
"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'.Wow. Reading these comments so many people here really don't understand how LLMs work or what's actually going on at the frontier of the field.
I feel like there's going to be a cultural sonic boom, where when the shockwave finally catches up people are going to be woefully under prepared based on what they think they saw.
AKA "future shock"
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?
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 the LLMs also know who pays tarrifs
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.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin
They're right
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.
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.
Bot even that smart. There a study recently that simple questiona like "what was huckleberry finn first published" had a 60% error rate.
yeah my analogy is not so good.. LLMs suck with factual stuff, they are better with coding or languages (Claude has been really helpful to me with Estonian).
They're not even that smart.
Well yes, they are glorified text autocomplete, but they still have their uses which could be considered "smart". For example I was struggling with a programming thing today and an LLM helped me out, so in a way it is smarter than me in that specific thing. I think it's less that they are dumb and more that they have no agency whatsoever, they have to be pushed into the direction you want. Pretty annoying..
LLMs are smart, they are just not intelligent
Because an LLM is smarter than about 50% of Americans.
Maybe even more.
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.”
Right? What the article needs to talk about is how very, very low that bar is.
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.
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?
I was about to remark how this data backs up the events we've been watching unfold in America recently
There’s a lot of ignorant people out there so yeah, technically LLM is smarter than most people.
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.
Am American.
....this is not the flex that the article writer seems to think it 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
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.
I know enough people for whom that's true.
The funny thing about this scenario is by simply thinking that’s true, it actually becomes true.
I don't think a single human who knows as much as chatgpt does exists. Does that mean chatgpt is smarter then everyone? No. Obviously not based on what we've seen so far. But the amount of information available to these LLMs is incredible and can be very useful. Like a library contains a lot of useful information but isn't intelligent itself.
That's pretty weak reasoning, by your own words, it isn't intellignt, it doesnt know anything.
By that logic wikipedia is also smarter than any human because it has lot of knowledge.
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.
I wouldn't be surprised if that is true outside the US as well. People that actually (have to) work with the stuff usually quickly learn, that its only good at a few things, but if you just hear about it in the (pop-, non-techie-)media (including YT and such), you might be deceived into thinking Skynet is just a few years away.
It's a one trick pony.
That trick also happens to be a really neat trick that can make people think it's a swiss army knife instead of a shovel.
Two things can be true at once! Though I suppose it depends on what you define as “a few.”
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.
Maybe if the adults actually didn't use the LLMs so much this wouldn't be the case.
Considering the amount of people that either voted trump or not voted at all, I'd say that there's a portion of americans lying.
What that overwhelming, uncritical, capitalist propaganda do...
At least half of US adults think that they themselves are smarter than they actually are, so this tracks.