Project Liberty Substack

Should we be polite to our AI chatbots?

We don’t thank our refrigerators for a job well done. Our GPS doesn’t understand words of encouragement. So why are AI systems any different?

Today’s advanced AI systems are accessed through a conversational chat window, which has long been a primary way for humans to communicate with one another. It should come as no surprise, then, that many of us use pleasantries in our conversations with AI (“please,” “thank you”)—even when that’s not strictly necessary. (Sam Altman said last year that those pleasantries have cost OpenAI “tens of millions of dollars.”)

But does our politeness have any bearing on the output of an AI chatbot?

In this week’s newsletter, we dive into the research on whether being nice to an AI chatbot has more to do with us as humans than it does with what results AI systems return to us.