There's a common saying in reference to why designing bear-proof campground trash cans is so hard: there's a serious overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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I mean by that bar, even copilot has 55% of the US beat :P
Yeah but so does my dog.
Definitely wanna raise that number a bit
~Okay~ ^55%^
I just pulled it from
54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).
If we looped in science deniers, climage deniers, flat earthers and chemtrails it could go quite high, but that's a difficult task as many of those overlap in the <6th grade venn diagram.
already smart as managers thats why they so popular with management. Of course they will never be actually able to replace management cuz of "reasons"
That's why I can't help but scoff when people say "It's not real artificial intelligence, it's just a stochastic parrot". Like my dude, have you ever interacted with the average person?
That isn't what bothers me the most though. Earlier today I read a piece by a "tech journalist" in a paper I normally respect as doing proper work. The mentioned that one of the guys behind Claude says that Claude writes absolutely all their code now. They also said they did a test of one of the most recent models (released earlier this week), and that it wrote "A full Amazon-cloud based page that did various verification and authentication jobs, was about 67 000 lines of code, and was approved by the IT department in minutes in an afternoon". The last part tells me they have no clue what they're talking about. They just generated 67 000 lines of potential bugs that works, and which wasn't reviewed by anyone competent. Nobody reviews 67 000 lines of code in a day, let alone minutes. Just the fact that they thought generating a shitload of boilerplate (most of the lines were likely that) impressive, says enough.
It's not your average Joe thinking this is cool that bothers me (it is cool). It's when allegedly competent people start thinking the LLM actually has any idea what it's doing.
Yeah, I worry about my Claude projects, that do simple tasks, that only I use, generally inside my home network where no one can exploit it not that anyone would want to.
Meanwhile, these huge companies are writing 50-100% of their shipping products used by millions in some cases.
Damn that hurts. I hate how right you are, take my upvote
My toaster is already smarter than my brother in law
People always complain about AI slop, but the fact of the matter is, even a shitty AI produces better output than what the majority of people are capable of.
Only if you're not familiar with the act of producing what the AI is trying to emulate the production of.
Yeah, just try to get the average person to write an email that's legible, concise and to the point.
Any literate person can do that? Despite the public education systems best efforts to train us all in such a manner as to overly pad everything out with an excessive quantity of superfluous filler words, many of which add nothing to the information communicated and may even continue long after the point is made.
I have terrible news for you; people are not generally literate then.
If you've ever read an AI email, they aren't capable of that either. It's a meme at this point that people use AI to write an email, which becomes far too long, and the reader uses AI to make it shorter. AI does not do concise and to the point.
if the majority of people were incapable of meeting the standard of AI, then AI wouldn't have enough data to train on to be better than the majority. it's a lossy database of things that already exist, it cannot create novelty or surpass its training set.
Most people can't do that either.
AI doesn't produce data suitable for training AI. It's a huge problem when AI generated slop makes its way into the training set because it generally degrades the quality of the model. Like a photocopy of a photocopy.
So where is all the data its trained on to surpass most people come from? Do you think they're curating what they feed it based on IQ scores or something? Verifying accuracy, competency, etc? Or are you aware they just turn on the reddit/stackoverflow/github/etc. scrapers and start pumping them full of unfiltered 100% pure grade A internet bullshit?
Yes, I'm aware of that. But you don't seem to be aware of the fact that most cultural output (and yes, that includes Reddit shitposts) is produced by a small minority of people. Most people never contribute anything. So however shit the AI slop may be (which I'm not in any way denying), it's still better than what the majority of people can manage. Just look at the percentage of people that are functionally illiterate.
Im sorry dude but if your argument is reddit and stackoverflow are the basis for being "better than what the majority of people can manage" then I just have to respectfully disagree.
Then you obviously live in a bubble.
To be fair, I do think the average accepted stackoverflow answer displays far more competence than the average human.
One of the few things I use LLM's for is giving me overviews of best-practice in things I'm not familiar with (before reading the posts I find to get more in-depth understanding)
I would assume they rank the stuff by vote-count.
That's exactly what people have done for millennia though. It's literally the reason you have heat in the winter and aren't living in a cave.
Any person without training is infinitely better than an AI without training data.
A person without training data world be a blathering idiot. Any word you've ever heard, anything you've ever seen, smelled or otherwise perceived is data that was used to train the neural network in your head. And that's not counting the billions of years it took to hardwire the hardwired bits.
A human with no experience in the field is liable to recognise that fact and start asking questions, showing doubt and learning. That's infinitely better than spewing incorrect bullshit.
That majority of people that are worse than AI slop are also not producing anything, so we're not flooded with human slop. And when they do, we're supportive because you need to practice producing bad stuff before you can start producing good stuff.
If humans produced slop at the same rate as AI, I guarantee you that everyone will be complaining about it just the same.
yeah but I don't hire those people
Your concept of human being is questionable.
What do you mean? Are you saying stupid people aren't real human beings?
I'm seriously questioning what you consider good, then. That's the reason people call it "slop". It's not good.
Smarter than my cousin Larry? Psht. There's a boxwood bush outside my bedroom window that's smarter than cousin Larry.
But realistically, the machines might be smarter than the average poorly motivated human in certain criteria. Hard to take anybody seriously that disagrees with that position.
On the other hand, an average human with sufficient and proper motivation? I'm still on team people in that case.
Manager types are the easiest to replace with a LLM. And we actually didn't get much closer to AGI the last 10 years.
The average tech bro.
The poorly educated probably.
In this case, it really doesn't have to do with education.
Lol. The "poorly educated" are a segment of the US electorate that voted for trump.
It was a joke. Also the average reading level for America is grade school level and are functionally illiterate.
Yeah, but my point is that ChatGPT clearly has a high level of education.
Where education refers to training someone to take in a lot of data and spew out similar data based on it during exams.
Smarter than me already.
Smarter than the bilioners.
(Can't tell if you did that on purpose)
This is killing me cause it's so true. Now I'm sad rereading myself.
We live in a country where 77million people voted for a corrupt pedofile imbecile who committed an insurrection that he should have been hanged for live on TV
Managers and tech billionaires
More than most would think. Everytime i see statements like this im reminded of a yellowstone ranger once on trash can lids: "theres a significant overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans". Then considering the rates of literacy and inability for people to find and discern information sources. I think people will be far more dissappointed in the reality of the situation.