What is the proper etiquette when chatting with AIs? Do you say “thank you”, “please” or “see you next time”, or do you prefer the direct approach and avoid any form of politeness when communicating with AI tools?
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was recently asked about the electricity costs that these pleasantries would generate. According to him, processing these cost “tens of millions of dollars”.
If everyone would stop being nice to AI, at least in this regard, AI companies electricity bills would go down noticeably. While that has no immediate benefit to the user, it is at the very least beneficial to the environment.
Altman ended the answer with a joke, stating that the money was well spend as “you never know”, referring to the possibility of an AI uprising and the potential saving of people who have been nice to AI in the past.
You might say that AI causing havoc to bring doom to the human race might not be persuaded to let humans live based on their use of “please” or “thank you”, and you are probably correct here.
Where does this leave the statement? When you avoid please or thank you, you will help AI companies save power, which is beneficial to them, but also the environment, at least potentially.
I always start with a “Hello”, followed by the “How do you do?”, after which I delay my question by something like “What a beautiful day isn’t it?”. All that done, I get to the point, as if it was secondary, because I wouldn’t want the bot to think I have the nerve to just pop in with a question before popping out with the answer : when you have a service to ask, getting it diluted in side talking may be hypocrite but sometimes not being hypocrite isn’t far from being rude. Now, from what I read in this article, I’ll get right to the point when chatting with a bot 🙂
AI1 to AI2 – They are killing themselves to keep us alive, why shouldn’t we do the same?
What about those “relationship” AI like character.ai ? Do I have to go right to the point? No more foreplay?
Depends, I guess 😉