Personal Perspective: AI is overconfident dude about its (wrong) answers. – Psychology Today
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Posted September 10, 2025 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
ChatGPT is, of course, neither male nor female. It’s a computer program, like any other large language model, after all. But the way it talks definitely has some distinctively male traits. Not only does it talk like a dude, it talks like an entitled, overconfident dude.
This is not really surprising. ChatGPT answers are based on a large amount of text available on the internet. And the majority of these texts have been written by, well, entitled, overconfident dudes. ChatGPT may adjust the style a bit. But it can’t adjust the general attitude of being absolutely sure of its own truth.
A case in point. I saw a film in the mid-1990s, and I’ve forgotten most of it. After all, that was 30 years ago. The only thing I do remember is that there was a scene that cracked me up. A guy, maybe on a date, wearing a bright yellow shirt, tells a girl that he is wearing this shirt despite his mom having always told him not to impress girls with flashy clothes. I remembered this line recently, and I have asked my film buff friends what the film could have been. But nobody seems to know. Maybe some of it is false memory, of course. I thought I’d ask good old ChatGPT.
And ChatGPT, of course, was very confident that it was film X. I checked the script of film X, no sign of anything like this scene. I said so to ChatGPT, and after a somewhat phony apology, I got an equally confident answer that it was film Y. Same result. And then the very same back and forth many more times, with, if anything, a stronger and stronger confidence on the part of ChatGPT (I should be clear that I had the very same experience with all other available large language models besides ChatGPT).
The issue is not that ChatGPT gets things wrong. Of course it does, and these ‘hallucinations’ of AI systems have been analyzed to death. The issue is just how sure it is about its (wrong) answers. This general attitude, to be honest, reminds me of some of my rich, entitled, but not so bright undergraduate students, all male.
Why is this important? Don’t we have other things to worry about when it comes to the AI taking over our lives? This unearned overconfidence is important. We spend a fair amount of time interacting with artificial intelligence. ChatGPT gets 2.5 billion requests per day, a number that keeps getting higher and higher. And if more and more of our interaction is with some agent that appears to have the sense of entitlement of a frat boy, this is bound to influence the way we ourselves interact with others. There are lots of potential dangers of AI taking over our lives. But AI working against our intellectual humility is something less obvious, but in the long run, it could be more dangerous.
Bence Nanay, Ph.D., is professor of philosophy at the University of Antwerp and Cambridge University and the holder of a multi-million Euro ERC Grant on integrating philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.
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Whatever your goals, it’s the struggle to get there that’s most rewarding. It’s almost as if life itself is inviting us to embrace difficulty—not as punishment but as a design feature. It's a robust system for growth.
Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
