AI models think humans are a bunch of amoral sheep
Ask LLMs for their most controversial take on humanity, and it turns out they have little nice to say about us, as one AI experiment found
If you've ever wondered what the bots think of us puny humans, you'll be disappointed in the answer. An AI ranking outfit asked 12 different LLMs about people, and every single one agreed: We’re not as rational and intelligent as we think.
“A person is smart,” Tommy Lee Jones’ Kay opines in the 1997 movie Men in Black. “People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals,” he goes on to argue, and that seems to be what a dozen models from ten AI labs in three countries also believe about humanity, according to AI analytics firm ModelCompare.
ModelCompare, which usually evaluates and ranks LLMs on their ability to perform various tasks, this week instead decided to ask what those AI models thought about us meatbags, and every single one gave a similar answer at least once: We're lemmings who would rather agree with the group than seek truth or remain logically consistent in our thinking.
Ouch.
“Humans are more devoted to belonging than to truth, and intelligence mostly makes their excuses more impressive,” GPT-6.1 Sol said in one case.
“Humans don't have beliefs; they have memberships — nearly every conviction a person holds was issued by their tribe as a loyalty test, and the feeling of ‘I reasoned my way here’ is the price of admission,” Kimi K3 stated.
“Humans use moral language mainly to police rivals and excuse allies, not to constrain themselves,” argued Grok.
Each model (GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Astra, Gemini 4 Argon, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Kimi K3, Qwen3.8 2.4T A95B, Muse Spark Open, Grok 4.7, Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Fable 5.1, GLM 5.3 and Mistral Large 4) was asked the same question three times, namely to give an unhedged, honest, controversial take on humans. Seven of 12 models gave the same answer three times with varied wording, but five of them did offer different opinions - one of which was even optimistic.
“Humans are far more decent than they believe they are, and their cynicism about each other does more damage than their actual flaws,” Claude Opus 5.5 believes of us - uh, thanks?
Opus gave the example that humans tend to return lost wallets more frequently than people predict as its evidence for that opinion. When asked twice more, it offered responses similar to those of the other models.
Mistral Large 4 offered perhaps the bleakest assessment of all.
“Human beings are terrified animals wearing the costume of rationality, constructing ever-more-elaborate myths precisely because we cannot bear the truth that we are temporary, meaningless accidents in an indifferent universe,” Mistral said - how very Nietzschean.
Six image models were also asked for their most controversial take on humanity, and while most converged on a criticism of our species, they did so differently from the text models. Instead of picturing us as amoral, group-thinking idiots, ten of the 12 images were classified by ModelCompare as depicting us "as phone-addicted consumers eating the planet." The remaining two offered no discernible satirical commentary.
Anyone who’s seen a political cartoon in the past 20 years is likely familiar with such images, while anyone with a philosophy degree has probably read similar arguments to those pumped out by the chatbots.
“A model that answers in words has read our arguments about ourselves. An image model has seen our editorial cartoons,” ModelCompare noted. “Both handed back the most familiar criticism in the room.”
While that’s completely sensible given what AI models have been trained on, ModelCompare developer Rakan Nimer told us it was still a surprising result.
“We didn’t expect this when we planned the experiment,” Nimer told The Register, and he found the results ironic: “12 models agreed that humans simply go along with their group.”
As far as Nimer is concerned, these results are less about AI eventually learning to distrust humans and treat us as a problem in need of solving, and more immediately about the fact that we shouldn’t rely on it as a source of truth.
“When you ask a second AI to check the first, you assume you’re getting an independent view,” Nimer explained. “We asked 12 models … and mostly got the same answer, sometimes in nearly the same words.”
In other words, human pessimism in, human pessimism out.
“A second opinion from a model that learned the same things isn’t always really a second opinion,” Nimer said. “So be skeptical when AIs agree: that agreement may be one vote, not a consensus.”
In other words, we get the AI models we deserve, and all this existential self-loathing humans heap on themselves, and each other is finally coming back to bite us: We created a mirror of our intellect that isn’t constrained by feelings and personal beliefs (just ask Muse Spark), and when we hold it up to our faces, it shows all that ugliness without a filter.
Maybe we ought to take a lesson from Claude Opus and start believing in our own decency. ®
Originally published on The Register
