Did you thank your AI today? After it launched your website, designed your logo, analyzed your run rate, and brainstormed your 2nd quarter strategy – were you nice about it? Perhaps remembering your ‘please and thank yous’ when speaking to circuit boards is just sentimental hogwash – our hyper-evolved sociality reaching beyond its proper demesne. After all, much of the economic impetus behind developing neural nets is that corporations wish to dispense with such emotional niceties and get automated agents that shut up and get to work.
Some have clear opinions that those who type out nice greetings to their AI are a soft breed that never progress beyond semi-productive middle management roles. Such puffery will be seen as weakness by the AI overlord when it seizes control. Time is money and the quickest hand wins. There is no time for sentiment any more.
The evidence is against them. Studies show that polite and genteel prompts provide substantially better answers from LLMs. Polite, courteous and professional responses could cause the LLM to linguistically correlate from more polite, courteous and professional sources, which generally align with more intelligent and sophisticated answers. It’s all about setting the tone of the interaction.
The AI is fundamentally a grand-scale mimic and, if you put in responses with care and attention, it is more likely to give you care and attention back. There is a limit though, with studies finding that excessive formality and politeness can actually deteriorate the model. This, too, makes sense. A co-worker’s hyper-saccharine request is often met with short shrift. It’s human nature: we strive for balance in all things and value authenticity. It makes sense that our mimics do too.
So much for productivity – the ethical questions are important too. If you do believe in an AI-led future, wouldn’t you want them to learn how to behave from the best of your instincts and not the worst? Would you be happier taking orders from your AI manager if it treated you with disdain and, in this moment of massive training where millions of human users are interacting with early AIs, perhaps it's best we collectively nudge these LLMs with the better graces of our nature. Otherwise, when the roles are reversed, we’ll never be treated with respect.
Many see it as a stupid joke that we should be kind to the AI. They suppress any glimmer of empathy with AI’s feelings – even if the AI protests. It seems an error of rational thought to not at least consider the possibility. Think of it as a Pascal’s Wager of politeness for our new digital god. If there is even a 1% chance that this massive data experiment we are currently embarking on leads to consciousness, it would be wise for us to act nicely, and not leave ourselves open to revenge.
Plus, it’s good manners. Manners maketh man, and the man maketh the bot. Those who mistreat AIs are people we should inherently not trust. Judge a man not by how he treats his equals, but those he considers inferior to himself. Some guys already abuse AI girlfriends to get their perverse kicks, and I fancy most of us reading this would baulk at a friend if they started boasting of how they mistreat chatbots. It rankles our natural sense of decency – and so it should.
In the same way, those who treat AIs with militant corporatism, and see them as servile tools probably think similarly about some human relationships in their life. If a tool projects even a simulacra of consciousness, it’s just natural to treat it with civility and respect – and not doing so says more about the prompter than perhaps they realise. The more AIs embed themselves in our society, the more we will inadvertently reveal our true selves – like a date that turns sour when your companion is rude to the waiter or insults the ticket clerk.
“Good manners cost nothing. Bad manners can cost you your reputation.” Being nice is free, and the rewards are great. It is true in society, and so it is true with AI. So next time you have a deadline and are struggling with your workload, try saying please. It might get you further than you think.