Men, it’s probably best to leave faking intelligence to AI chatbots.
According to a new survey from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, over half of dudes will pretend to know stuff about the AI industry even if they have absolutely zero clue what they’re talking about.
In the survey, Harvard researchers asked more than 5,400 respondents if they knew who various AI executives were. A full 98 percent of men said they were familiar with Elon Musk, which seems reasonable, and 73 percent said they knew who Sam Altman was. But what about more peripheral figures? When it came to Susan Milner and Craig Dalton, only 53 percent of men said they knew who they were.
There was a hilarious catch: Milner and Dalton don’t exist. Men, the data showed, were chronic bluffers. Women fibbed about knowing who Milner and Dalton were, too, but at a much lower share of 40 percent each.
“We’re seeing that men are more optimistic and more confident” across the board when it comes to AI, Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center executive director Laura Manley told Wired.
It says a lot about men, sure, but also AI discourse. It’s a topic that’s dominating the conversation and seeping into every facet of our culture. AI is either going to destroy the world or cure cancer and help us conquer the galaxy. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being poured into it, and it’s quickly reshaping society. It’s incredibly consequential, in other words. So you have to have a take on it and know everything about it, or risk looking like an idiot.
“There’s so much confidence in either doom or abundance,” Manley told Wired. “It just drowns out all of the voices that should be saying ‘not sure.’”
Besides pretending they were knowledgeable, men were also more optimistic about AI, the survey showed — while women were more concerned and worried. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss.
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