spoiler
Do you say “Please” or “Thank you” to ChatGPT? If you’re polite to OpenAI’s chatbot, you could be part of the user base costing the company “Tens of millions of dollars” on electricity bills.
User @tomiinlove wrote on X, “I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models.”
OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, responded, “Tens of millions of dollars well spent - you never know.” Thanks for lowering the world’s anxiety around an AI uprising, Sam. We’ll all be sure to waste even more energy by saying “Please” or “Thank You” from now on.
In February, Future PLC, the company that owns TechRadar, compiled a survey of more than 1,000 people on their AI etiquette. The survey found that around 70% of people are polite to AI when interacting with it, with 12% being polite in case of a robot uprising.
Obviously, there’s an energy cost when using ChatGPT, which has massive AI-powered servers that run the whole operation. But as these tools thrive in popularity, are most of us even aware that one simple message, or one AI-generated meme, is impacting the planet?
TechRadar reached out to OpenAI for comment, we’ll update this story when we hear back.
Should we be polite to AI?
If being polite to AI can have such an impact on energy consumption, should we even bother being nice to ChatGPT?
Presumably, these ‘Tens of millions of dollars’ Altman speaks of are due to users saying “Please” or “Thank You” in a contained message rather than at the end of a prompt. Hopefully, OpenAI will respond to our query to give us more of an understanding of how people frame these particular messages.
TechRadar writer Becca Caddy stopped saying thanks to ChatGPT and found that being polite to an AI chatbot might actually help with responses.
In her article, she wrote, "Polite, well-structured prompts often lead to better responses, and in some cases, they may even reduce bias. That’s not just a bonus – it’s a critical factor in AI reliability.
As AI evolves, it will be fascinating to see whether politeness itself becomes a built-in feature. Could AI favor users who communicate respectfully? Will models be trained to respond differently based on etiquette?"
So while it may not be energy-efficient, being polite to AI could in fact give you a better experience while interacting with ChatGPT. But is it worth the environmental cost?
That’s not the brag he thinks it is. Literally just don’t use the AI to respond to prompts that are just “thank you”. Just have a bank of prewritten responses that are all slight variations of “you’re welcome”. The fact that they can’t think of that to save “tens of millions of dollars” shows that they’re bad with money.
But I doubt it’s actually anywhere near that much anyway.
The survey found that around 70% of people are polite to AI when interacting with it, with 12% being polite in case of a robot uprising.
Look man, my boss says please and thank you to me but it doesn’t mean I’m exempting him from the uprising. The robots aren’t going to choose who lives and who dies based on your politeness.
Just fucking ban it holy shit
They could just automatically reply to a thank you message with a copy pasted no problem but instead they process it like a actual request lol.
Its a good example of why the west is failing in AI. They dont understand how to be efficient just how to waste. Chinese models tend to be a lot more efficient.
say you take two accounts and short-circuit them to one another, would this be worth it
I rarely ever use ChatGPT (when I do it’s for help with writing webscraping scripts for “piracy” / digital archival / being able to read things conveniently offline ) but when I do I always thank it for its help because I was raised to be polite.
When I use Android Auto and my car responds to a voice command, I thank it and call it by its name. You should always try to appease the machine spirit so it works.
me laughing at the guy in my office whose printer is always jammed bc he doesn’t apply any of the sacred oils
“Okay Grok, please think up a fun way I can torture murder a box car full of migrants, please and thank you!”
Sorry, but your request has been automatically rejected for being insufficiently loyal to the United States. Please increase the scale to at least 1 million and then try again.
approvesWhy don’t they just make them respond with a default message instead of letting it go through the LLM? Seems dumb
They do this when you swear at the machine, so they know it’s possible
When the cost of electricity gets too high, its good to say please and thank you to whatever human being has to wear the “Im an AI chatbot” hat for your.
I usually paste Industrial Society and Its Future in the end of my messages to chatgpt
