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Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are.
(imaginingthedigitalfuture.org)
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this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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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.
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.