Raw LLM Responses

You're being downvoted, but what you said is true. Average intelligence has increased throughout most of human history by virtue of improvements in education as well as the advancement of academic fields themselves. However, the sharing of information has become much easier and further distributed, too, thus allowing "dumb" ideas and theories to spread like wildfire amongst gullible people or people who simply know no better. Often these "dumb" ideas aren't even that dumb, they're simply misled. For example, thinking that AI is sentient isn't a "dumb" idea - it can certainly appear that way when chatting with it. It only becomes a "dumb" idea once information about how LLMs operate is understood. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the public knows nothing about LLMs aside from their existence or how to use one, and thus is very susceptible to believing believable "dumb" ideas like this. Perhaps the nuance your comment needed is that, despite intelligence increasing as time progresses, stupidity has become farther reaching as ideas are able to propogate more and more easily across the population.