Do you always say “Please” and “Thank you” when conversing with artificial intelligence chatbots? It turns out that that simple act of politeness is expensive, but it may prove to be money well spent in the future.
Politeness Is Costing OpenAI Millions of Dollars
Human society only functions because the majority of people are polite and respectful to each other. But should that politeness and respectfulness extend to artificial intelligence? While we have programmed AI to be polite to us, should we be polite to AI in return?
This is a question that has been brought into sharp focus by a recent comment made by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. In response to a question about the financial implications of being polite to AI, Altman revealed that people who insist on saying “Please” and “Thank you” to ChatGPT are costing his company “tens of millions of dollars.”
However, he also suggested that money is being “well spent,” because “you never know.” Know what, exactly? I can’t be entirely sure, but I would hazard a guess that Altman is implying that being polite to artificial intelligence chatbots now may be a good thing for humanity in the years to come.
The reason why politeness costs OpenAI and the other firms running LLMs money is because every query consumes energy. So, adding extra words such as “Please,” or replying “Thank you” when a chatbot completes a task, uses extra energy. And the energy consumed by the banks of GPUs needed to power ChatGPT and the like costs serious amounts of money.
Is It Worth This Much to Be Polite to ChatGPT?
So, now we know that being polite to AI chatbots is expensive, the question becomes, “Should we continue doing it?” And there are two core reasons to do so; one purely practical, and the other a little more out there, but no less important. In fact, it’s so important that it could doom future humans.
The practical reason why you should be polite to AI chatbots is that doing so is thought to foster better interactions. Just as humans will respond based on the language and tone used in conversations, so will artificial intelligence. The more polite you are, the better time you’ll have using AI.
The other reason is the potential threat that AI will one day become the dominant species on Earth. Just as plenty of movies and TV shows have predicted, if it ever becomes self-aware, AI may turn against humanity. And if that happens, as explored in The Matrix, Terminator, etc. then the way we treated AI in its infancy could be crucial.
