to say please and thank you when talking to ChatGPT?

[Holsandcritters]

I feel rude not to!

Yes, because it may be a computer, but I am a human. 🤷‍♀️

(I've ticked that box many a time to say I am not a robot...) 😁

Chatty Petey!

https://www.tiktok.com/@mamakay10000/video/7637236398130613526

I do, but I also thank my dishwasher and the cash machine so am probably not the best person to ask! 😂

https://youtube.com/shorts/rVlmbhwn0RM?is=vhMNZdhrWEjQ34XR

I saw this a while ago by Hannah Fry about why we should say please and thank you to AI

That’s my thought process too. I also always say please and thank you to Alexa (although, the other day I did call her ‘bloody useless’, so my mask may have slipped 😂😂)

Even though I know AI isn’t sentient, I feel guilty if I ask Alexa to tell me a story (to send me to sleep) and I choose Audible when she says “Would you like me to tell you a story or would you like an Audible story?”

I'm always polite to Chatgpt. Apparently politeness tends to get you better quality responses https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14531

I also think that, if you get into the habit of barking rude instructions as chatgpt, this might seep into the rest of your life and you end up coarsening your interactions with humans as well as non-humans.

(I'm also hopeful of better treatment from our AI overlords, natch.)

pfffffffffffffffffff 😂people are nuts.

DH despises Alexa as he always used to say please to her and she’d never listen to him, always ignored him or said “I don’t know how to help you with that”. Whereas I’d just get to the point without a please and she’d do it straight away.

I always say please and thank you and when then give a really good explanation of something I am really appreciative in my reply. Call me stupid but I don’t understand why this is bad for the environment, at least is it any worse than the power used to go on Mumsnet or any other internet site?

Heartless!
🤯

She’ll be first on their list come the robot revolution

What do you mean you can't switch off your manners?

Are you genuinely incapable of adapting your speech (or writing) to suit your audience? Do you communicate with everyone - adults, babies, dogs, friends, enemies, bosses, strangers, machines - in exactly the same way?

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'.

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

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

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. 😊

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.

My toaster is a dick anyway.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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