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So much for “manners are free”. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has said that users saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT is costing the company tens of millions of dollars.
Now, that figure came from an exchange on X.com between a user and Altman, so it’s not necessarily accurate. Altman was making a joke, so we probably shouldn’t read too much into the number.
Last week, an X.com user asked: “I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models?”
Altman replied the next day, jokingly raising the spectre of the existential threat of AI systems taking over as the preeminent intelligence on earth: “tens of millions of dollars well spent – you never know”.
Of course, this round of AI comes with a serious financial and environmental cost, so it makes sense to be as energy efficient as possible when using such systems. A thread on Reddit attempted to unpick the impact, but it really comes down to the type of model and how it’s phrased.
ChatGPT itself suggested that that a short prompt like “thank you” could cost the equivalent to 0.01 to 0.1 watt-hours. So not much, but if 100 of us do it that’s 1W to 10W… a 100,000 and it’s 1kW to 10kW.
In short, it adds up if we all do it, so perhaps include your pleasantries in the initial prompt, rather than sending it as a follow up message that forces the system to reply.
Most of us do maintain human standards for politeness with AI systems like ChatGPT. A survey from earlier this year found that 71% of Brits and 67% of Americans choose to be polite to machines, whether that’s ChatGPT or smart speakers.
Why? Most agreed with the sentiment that “it’s just the nice thing to do”, though 12% of Americans and Brits said their manners were aimed to appease AI ahead of an inevitable robot uprising.
For those who aren’t actively polite, most said it was a waste of time, while one in ten of the overall sample agreed with the statement that “it’s a machine, why would I be polite?”
There may be technical benefits to politeness, too. Some research has suggested you can get a more accurate response by taking a polite tone with AI, and one study suggested that being rude to AI actually led to more errors and bias.
Though you should keep prompts succinct for environmental reasons, you should interact with AI however you’d like to. After all, being great at natural language processing is the entire point of these large language models.
When it comes to future technologies, when they inevitably do arrive, we find we have to bend to meet them – perhaps faking an American accent to convince an Alexa that we are indeed speaking English, taking off glasses to open your iPhone because it can’t handle your new specs, reorganising your living room so your Roomba can reach the rug to vacuum, or even just inputting data in a specific format so your spreadsheet doesn’t break. We often have to meet machines part way.
Let’s not do that here. The whole point of chatbots is the ability to use natural language as an interface with machines. So use your natural language, be it politely interspersed with “thank yous”, terse and to the point, full of slang, or down right rude. (Personally, I address ChatGPT as “my dude”.)
You are human. Express yourself how you’d like.
And anyway, if the existential crisis raised by AI is real and not just marketing, do you really think saying “please and thank you” will save you?
To read more about what’s going to happen in the future, we humbly suggest you buy Nicole’s book, The Long History of the Future: Why tomorrow’s technology still isn’t here.
