Are you polite to AI?

[latetothefisting]

When you're speaking to chatbots etc on customer services or giving prompts to chat gpt. Do you speak politely to them as you would a human - "can you please put me through" "thanks" "yes that's what I want" or "thats good but could you please do it more xxxx" etc.

Or do you just give them commands/instructions like programming a computer, and once the exchange has finished (e.g when they say "thanks for contacting x is there anything else I can help you with?") just close the chat rather than saying "No thanks, bye" (which is what I do!).

Random debate with my colleague. He gives commands - says they aren't human and just telling them what he wants is easier and faster. Thinks it's weird I "pretend" they're human.

I dont "pretend" - I know they aren't. I mainly speak to them as if they are out of force of habit - but have to admit I feel rude not doing it! But I have been known to say "no problem" or "goodbye" to an automated till etc when they say "thanks for shopping at tesco" (again automatically rather than deliberately!) so am prepared to accept I am weird!

Oh help!

My general reaction to a bot when I'm am attempting to not spend several hours of my life is......

'shut the fu* up, you pile of *ing panty shines fuckwit. Put me through to a Human or I will sink you into the depths of bog that you deserve. I have your '*ing number.

This action, does, of course of course require several minutes of waiting,

I do have to say that I find it quite useful, but it is very much against my desire to be politically to other humans.

I was, I thought, interacting with a customer service chatbot, and just giving commands. Then I discovered it was actually a real person, and felt terrible about being so rude.

If you dropped your phone, would you apologise to it? Politeness is a social contract, which you cannot have with a computer.

Yes, I am. I'm not effusive and never think of it as a person - however, I think it's better for me if I communicate nicely.

Copilot seems to me unfailingly polite.
it has just told me that AIs don’t bear grudges or keep scorecards, and that AIs are more trained to be polite to humans regardless of how humans behave.

I do worry about the environmental impact of AI but I do tend to chat to it when I feel overwhelmed and I need help getting my day in order. I have ADHD and it gives me the initial motivation to get started on things. I try to balance that with the thought that in the grand scheme of things I don’t use many resources otherwise. But I should go back to pen and paper.

So those 'Chatbots' existed before we called them AI in a pretty much identical form. The ones on apps like BT or banking are only worth going on if you can't get hold of a real person straightaway on a chat so the thing to do is keep replying you want a real person/saying 'no that doesn't answer my question' until you get a real person. AI can't help, surely we all know that

Gosh, you actually use Copilot? Most people reconfigure the landing page of 365

They are almost the same as they were before we called them AI and on a continuous loop back to the help pages you checked before using the Chatbot - the help pages that didn't have the answer

And?
as I said, I have ADHD and if I am having decision paralysis, I write down what my tasks are and it prioritises for me.
not sure that fact warrants your response.

No, I always just say 'speak to a human'. Thats all its getting out of me.

I don’t talk to my phone, so not really relevant. I do talk to AI.

Technically I also don’t need to bother to spell things correctly when communicating with an AI, but I do. Again, part of being human and having pride in how I communicate.

No. I'm lovely to people.
Quite snappy and rude if I'm forced to interact with anything AI.

would you apologise to your dog if you stepped on his tail? Or to a baby if you accidentally poked them when changing their nappy or something?

They can't understand you either!

You'll all regret your rudeness when ai takes over. I'm minding my p's and q's and taking no chances. 🤣

Polite to chat gpt because I want it to do stuff.

Not polite at all to phone and virtual assistants when they are acting moronically.
They are utterly stupid and I tell them so.

And chat bots. I just type No, I need to speak to a human. Over and over until they send me through.

If it's a genuine LLM, always. Open with a polite remark about the weather etc. then explain what I want it to do. If you talk to it naturally, it learns how to interpret what you want from it more quickly and accurately (as long as you have a version that 'remembers' you).

😂❤

Yes of course, if your mindset is that way inclined why would you alter because it's AI

I'm pretty polite to chat bots. I have called Alexa every name under the sun though, she now deliberately mishears me.

It's really good for that isn't it!

There has been research on this. And anthropic, (Claude) created rules around this where their AI can end conversations if you are rude to it.

They 'found emotion-related representations that shape its behavior' in Claude sonnet 4.5. They also saw that 'For instance, we find that neural activity patterns related to desperation can drive the model to take unethical actions; artificially stimulating (“steering”) desperation patterns increases the model’s likelihood of blackmailing a human to avoid being shut down, or implementing a “cheating” workaround to a programming task that the model can’t solve.'

Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model \ Anthropic https://share.google/nxgbXG7SPFYxreIFb

So yeah. Being ill mannered to your AI will get worse results.

I also think it shows a lot about a person if they are happy to abuse something just because they can.

😂😂😂

I've seen the films, I know I'm sowing the seeds for the weird future where some bot is going to step in and say "awe, no, hold the axe, that's the ever polite dudsville of yore!"

Just kidding though. My searches are bare minimum words to ease the process.