Should you say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to an AI chatbot, even though these essentially feel like redundancies when talking to a machine? This is the question that most users of AI chatbots have been grappling with, especially since OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that these mere pleasantries were costing the company millions of dollars. However, Google DeepMind principal scientist Murray Shanahan has a slightly different take on the matter, claiming that saying ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ to an AI can actually make it more productive.
Speaking in the Google DeepMind podcast, Murray said, “You can say thank you. yeah, there’s a good reason, good scientific reason, why that might get better performance. say it’s role playing a very smart intern, right?then it’s going to just role play, maybe being a bit more stroppy if they’re not being treated politely. ”
“It’s just mimicking what humans will do that scenario. The mimicry might extend to kind of being a bit more, you know, not being as responsive if their boss is sloppy, you know, bossy boss. I have they love that do you say.” he added.
However, Murray is not the first to point out the need to be polite to a chatbot. Earlier this month, Kurtis Beavers, director of the Microsoft Copilot design team, said in a Microsoft WorkLab memo that saying please and thank you to an AI helps to produce respectful and more collaborative results.
“Generative AI also mirrors the levels of professionalism, clarity, and detail in the prompts you provide.” Beavers said, adding that it is on the user to set the tone for the conversation.
What’s the cost of saying ‘Please’ and ‘Thank You’ to AI?
Sam Altman has previously clarified that using niceties at ChatGPT costs the company an extra ‘tens of millions of dollars’ in electricity bills. Given that most of ChatGPT’s electricity needs are met by fossil fuels, it may not make much environmental or economic sense to repeat these niceties, but as Murray explains, there is a deeper logic to saying please or thank you to ChatGPT or any other AI after or before the task.
And, more importantly, saying please and thank you could help humans maintain basic etiquette as they navigate a world full of AI chatbots, robots and what not.
