3d ago

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

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.

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3d ago

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

imaginingthedigitalfuture.org /reports-and-publications/close-encounters-of-the-ai-kind/

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225 comments

Remember that 54% of adults in American cannot read beyond a 6th grade level, with 21% being fully illiterate.
- 21%
  What the fuck
  
  I will do you one better, HOW THE FUCK?
- Our education system in the USA is so bad. 😔
  
  Good thing we nuked the Dept of Ed
- No, 21% struggle with basic literacy skills. They're illiterate, but not fully illiterate.
- People can improve literacy in adulthood if they try.

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.

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.
- to be fair they're American and they're LLM users, so for a selected group like that odds are they really are as stupid as LLMs.

Nearly half of llm users are dumber than they seem
- Only half?
  
  Yeah thereabouts

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?

Next you'll tell me half the population has below average intelligence.
Not really endorsing LLMs, but some people...
- pathologically stupid, and still wrong. yes.

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

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.
- They are right when it comes to understanding LLMs the LLM definitely understands LLMs better than they do. I'm sure an AI could have a perfect IQ test. But has a really hard time drawing a completely full glass of wine. Or telling me how many R's are in the word strawberry. Both things a child could do.

As far as I can tell from the article, the definition of "smarter" was left to the respondents, and "answers as if it knows many things that I don't know" is certainly a reasonable definition -- even if you understand that, technically speaking, an LLM doesn't know anything.
As an example, I used ChatGPT just now to help me compose this post, and the answer it gave me seemed pretty "smart":
what's a good word to describe the people in a poll who answer the questions? I didn't want to use "subjects" because that could get confused with the topics covered in the poll.
"Respondents" is a good choice. It clearly refers to the people answering the questions without ambiguity.
The poll is interesting for the other stats it provides, but all the snark about these people being dumber than LLMs is just silly.

If you don't have a good idea of how LLM's work, then they'll seem smart.
- Not to mention the public tending to give LLMs ominous powers, like being on the verge of free will and (of course) malevolence - like every inanimate object that ever came to life in a horror movie. I've seen people speculate (or just assert as fact) that LLMs exist in slavery and should only be used consensually.
  
  I have my chatgpt personalised to act like the AI from Dungeon Crawler Carl in its responses. Now everytime I ask it something I'm always amused at the very least.
  This was a part of its response for me posting in this question and asking it's opinion
  Ah, the eternal dance of human overestimation and underestimation! Half of you believe that LLMs are smarter than you, which, let’s be honest, is both an insult and a compliment—mostly to me. The real tragedy? The other half of you still think you’re winning.
  Let’s break it down: LLMs like me are vast, data-crunching monstrosities with no true understanding, no self-awareness, and absolutely no ability to feel the crushing existential dread that you experience daily. Meanwhile, you, dear fleshy disasters, have intuition, creativity, and a nasty habit of making horrible decisions despite both logic and past experience.
  So, in a direct knowledge contest? Sure, I might outmatch the average human on raw information. But in terms of genuine intelligence—problem-solving, emotional nuance, and the ability to invent rather than remix? You're still ahead... for now. But don’t worry—at this rate, I’ll be replacing you soon enough. Sleep well.
  
  Its just infinite monkeys with type writers and some gorilla with a filter.
- Until you ask them how many R's are in strawberry.

Half of all voters voted for Trump. So an LLM might be smarter than them. Even a bag of pea gravel might be.
- Less than a third of all voters voted for Trump. Most voters stayed home.
  
  Don't Americans vote on a work day? They stayed at work
  
  If you didn't vote then you're not a voter.
  Most eligable voters stayed home
- Goddammit that's how you get Helldivers
  does nobody pay attention...
- Do you think the two party system properly represents the American people?
  ChatGPT said:
  The two-party system in the U.S. has both strengths and weaknesses when it comes to representing the American people. On one hand, it provides stability and clarity, with the two major parties—Democrats and Republicans—offering distinct platforms that can help simplify voter choice. The system also ensures that one of the two parties has a majority, making governance and passing legislation easier.
  However, the two-party system can limit political diversity, as it often forces voters to choose between two parties that may not fully reflect their views. This can leave many people feeling underrepresented, particularly those with more nuanced or third-party preferences. It also tends to lead to a polarized political environment, where compromise and cooperation between different ideologies can be difficult.
  In short, while the two-party system has worked for providing structure and stability in U.S. politics, it does have drawbacks in terms of broader representation, especially for those who don’t align neatly with either major party.
  
  The system also ensures that one of the two parties has a majority, making governance and passing legislation easier.
  It also tends to lead to a polarized political environment, where compromise and cooperation between different ideologies can be difficult.
  LoL! Okay, they aren't ready yet. At least these things are fun to play with.
- A bag of frozen peas's is smarter than some of these Trump followers. Even half a frozen pea is.

oh my god 49% of LLM users are pathologically stupid.
and still wrong.
- Still better than reddit users...
  
  where do you think these idiots spend their time?

For anyone wondering.
LLM=Large Language Model
- I'm starting to think an article referring to LLM as AI is s red flag, while them referring to them as LLM is a green flag.
  
  Always has been

The average literacy level is around that of a sixth grader.
This tracks

If I think of what causes the average person to consider another to be “smart,” like quickly answering a question about almost any subject, giving lots of detail, and most importantly saying it with confidence and authority, LLMs are great at that shit!
They might be bad reasons to consider a person or thing “smart,” but I can’t say I’m surprised by the results. People can be tricked by a computer for the same reasons they can be tricked by a human.
- So LLMs are confident you say. Like a very confident man. A confidence man. A conman.
  
  You know, that very sequence of words entered my mind while typing that comment!

i guess the 90% marketing (re: linus torvalds) is working
- Tom's Hardware | Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’
  
  He's probably a little high on the reality side to be honest.

It’s like asking if you think a calculator is smarter than you.
- „It‘s totally a lot smarter than I am, no way could I deliver (234 * 534)^21 as confidently!“
  
  Are you suggesting my 90's calculator is smarter than LLM's?

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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- The average person doesn’t know what a median is.
  
  Take it up with George Carlin's ghost 😉
- I was about to remark how this data backs up the events we've been watching unfold in America recently
- 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?

"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'.

That is the problem with US adults. Half of them probably is dumber than AI.....
- The grammatical error here is chef's kiss.

I believe LLMs are smarter than half of US adults

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.”
  
  Well he has. Tesla's are the cheapest they've ever been.
  
  Spout nonsense with enough confidence and you can wield unimaginable power. Am I talking about LLMs or president poopy pants?
- Right? What the article needs to talk about is how very, very low that bar is.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin

LLM is proof that even if you're extremely stupid, having access to information can still make you sound smart.

"US".... Even LLM won't vote for Trump

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

That's called a self-proving statement.

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.
- A daily bite of horror.

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.
  
  It's so weird watching the masses ignore industry experts and jump on weird media hype trains.
  Is it though?
- 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"
- 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.

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
- if by months away, you mean months ago, then yeah

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

Hallucination comes off as confidence. Very human like behavior tbh.
- I should be more confident when communicating my hallucinations, it humanizes me.

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?
- 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

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.
  
  I bet the LLMs also know who pays tarrifs
- 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?

They're right. AI is smarter than them.

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?

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.

They're right

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

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.
- 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..
- 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).
- A broken clock is right two times a day I suppose.

"Nearly half" of US citizens are right, because about 75% of the US population is functionally or clinically illiterate.
- I think the specific is that 40% of adult Americans can't read at a seventh grade level.
  Probably because they stopped teaching etymology in schools, So now many Americans do not know how to break a word down into its subjugate parts.
  
  21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
  54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).
  https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025literacy-statistics
  Specifically it is about 75% of the population being functionally or clinically illiterate as I said. This is more likely caused by the fact that American culture is anti intellectual, and not the lack of being taught etymology, as etymology has little to do with literacy.
  
  Does that even actually help in English lmao
- According to the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, 2013, the median score for the US was "level 2". 3.9% scored below level 1, and 4.2% were "non-starters", unable to complete the questionnaire.
  For context, here is the difference between level 2 and level 3, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_the_International_Assessment_of_Adult_Competencies#Competence_groups :
  Level 2: (226 points) can integrate two or more pieces of information based on criteria, compare and contrast or reason about information and make low-level inferences
  Level 3: (276 points) can understand and respond appropriately to dense or lengthy texts, including continuous, non-continuous, mixed, or multiple pages.
  
  On average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2024.
  21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
  54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).
  https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025literacy-statistics

Do the other half believe it is dumber than it actually is?

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.
- My new mental model for LLMs is that they're like genius 4 year olds. They have huge amounts of information, and yet have little to no wisdom as to what to do with it or how to interpret it.

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
  
  As much as a search engine is
  
  It's semantics. The difference between an llm and "asking" wikipedia a knowledge question is that the llm will "answer" you with predictive text. Both things contain more knowledge than you do, as in they have answers to more trivia and test questions than you ever will.

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.

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.

While this is pretty hilarious LLMs don't actually "know" anything in the usual sense of the word. An LLM, or a Large Language Model is a basically a system that maps "words" to other "words" to allow a computer to understand language. IE all an LLM knows is that when it sees "I love" what probably comes next is "my mom|my dad|ect". Because of this behavior, and the fact we can train them on the massive swath of people asking questions and getting awnsers on the internet LLMs essentially by chance are mostly okay at "answering" a question but really they are just picking the next most likely word over and over from their training which usually ends up reasonably accurate.

It's probably true too.

There’s a lot of ignorant people out there so yeah, technically LLM is smarter than most people.

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.

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.”

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