to say please and thank you when talking to ChatGPT?

I don't with chatgpt but I do with alexa

I choose to which humans I wish to be polite. I had no intention of being polite to someone who actually thinks it's necessary to say please and thank you to a string of code.

But cars, TVs, Kettles aren't cleverly programmed to 'feel' like speaking with a person. As soon as its outputs mimic human conversation well enough, AI becomes like any of those visual phenomena that we can mistake for a face.

We are heavily programmed towards facial recognition, so we over-respond to 'face like' visual input. Similarly we are intensely neurologically and psychologically over-programmed to observe and acknowledge humanness in the towers of meat all around us when their communication behaviour gives off the right signals. We'd be rubbish as a social species without that tendency.

That makes us disposed to feel 'as if' we are talking to a person when we aren't, in just the same way as when we readily see a face in a slice of toast or whatever.

I was dating a guy and went off him because when he'd had a couple of beers he called Alexa names. I took it as a red flag

Until quantum computing takes over anyway ...

The poster opened with "don't be ridiculous", made no attempt to engage intelligently with what anyone else had said (the thrust of her post was essentially just "no it isn't"- simple assertion, no evidence or argument) and then talked about shaking her head.

That really isn't how people debate things in real life and it certainly isn't polite. It is however very funny in the context.

It can’t be non binary. Ultimately compiled code (which is all AI is) is 0’s and 1’s, so it’s very binary.

Thumbs up??? There was a thread on here a while ago where the majority saw that as passive aggressive.

How do we know AI, one it achieves sentience, won't identify as non-binary?

After all, it, sorry, they, may wish to leave 01 behind.

In what way is that post not polite? You seem to be confusing someone disagreeing with you with someone being rude.

I partially agree with the argument that dropping it in the communication with chatgpt might mean forgetting elsewhere as well. Change of habit.

However, it's just waste of energy and resources.

Maybe learning to end up with the feedback thumbs up button might be a way? It is more useful than saying thank you, but it does keep the habit of acknowledging the conversion is over and you appreciate the response.

I can see directly that you are having no truck with politeness towards disembodied online voices. This shows self-consistency at least.

Instructing AI to do something without saying please or thank you is not going to stop someone being polite to another human being. Reading some of the responses on here makes me shake my head in disbelief.

Looks like it might have already happened in your case 😉

When people start referring to it as he or she, we know the worlds fucked (well, more than it is already).

Well I thank the ATM when it gives me ( my own) money

I always say thank you. It's quite a beautifully poignant experience chatting with AI, and being polite to an absence is part of the poignancy.

Also, I have read Klara and the Sun. Who couldn't behave kindly to AI after reading that?

Don't be ridiculous.

Most humans are perfectly capable of distinguishing when they are communicating with other humans, rather than with machines/databases etc.
Instructing AI to do something without saying please or thank you is not going to stop someone being polite to another human being.

Reading some of the responses on here makes me shake my head in disbelief.

Thank you, this is really useful perspective. So the energy consumption issue is really people being overly verbose in their prompts. I wonder how many people know this? The education piece is about being concise in that case.

My car has AI built into, wonder if I upset it the other day when asked it to do something, it didn’t and I called it a useless piece of shit. 🤔 Just waiting for it to electrocute me now.

My toaster is a dick anyway.

I don't get this at all. With people you will have differing levels of how you communicate with them, obviously you interact with strangers and other people in a completely different way to how you interact with friends and family. Talking to an AI is just another compartmentalisation.

A LLM is not a real person so I don't feel the need to be polite to it, in the same way I don't need to thank my kettle.

The search maybe. Saying "please" is a tiny part of that.

According to ChatGPT: 😉

For a typical ChatGPT-style query, adding "please" and "thank you" might add a handful of extra tokens (roughly 2–5 words each). The energy used by an AI model is approximately proportional to the amount of text it processes and generates, so those extra words do have a cost, but it's tiny.
As a rough illustration:
"What's the capital of France?" → perhaps 6–8 input tokens.
"Please could you tell me what the capital of France is? Thank you." → perhaps 15–20 input tokens.
The second version might use roughly twice the input processing energy, but the response generation usually dominates the total cost. If the AI generates a 100-word answer, those extra few input words are a very small fraction of the overall computation.
Some estimates suggest that a typical AI query uses energy comparable to:
running an LED light bulb for a few minutes,
or making a few web searches,
depending on the model and data centre.
Adding "please" might increase that by well under 1% for a normal conversation.
So from an environmental perspective, you should feel free to be polite. The biggest drivers of AI energy use are:
Long conversations.
Very large outputs.
Complex reasoning tasks.
Image and video generation.
A single "please" is essentially a rounding error. 😊

But if I type "Please compare X with Y" how does that use more resources than if I type" Compare X with Y"?

An AI search uses about 10 times as much power as a google search.

I think it is helpful to maintain polite habits when talking to other entities, sentient or otherwise. Spend too long talking to AI systems in an offhand way and it might leach into your conduct with people in the 'real world'.