This is kind of funny, but also an example of sometimes hidden implications of human behavior and sustainability (although I say that sustainability is a business problem needing a business solution). Not long ago, I read a LinkedIn post from someone urging us to be polite to chatGTP, Llama, Gemini, Grok and other AI systems. Very odd, in my opinion. AI is an inanimate tool for humans – why be polite to it? I’m not polite to other tools like hammers, saws or fasteners. Actually, I’ve been known to be outright rude to ratchets, sockets, wrenches and screwdrivers when working on cars. Why go out of your way to dust off Emily Post for AI?
The author of that post argued that people who treat AI poorly are likely to carry over that same behavior to their interactions in the real world with other humans. I dunno – I feel like most people can tell the difference between interacting with people and an AI system, just as most folks don’t throw people across the garage like they do a wrench. Er, at least I’ve heard that sometimes wrenches go flying…
Anyway, I just ran across an article that offers sustainability reasons for not being polite to AI:
“… a simple ‘thank you!’ triggers a full inference pass through billions of parameters, consuming computational resources and energy… [and] serves no functional purpose. And yet, Sam Altman said that saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to ChatGPT has cost OpenAI tens of millions of dollars…
Interestingly, larger models also tend to generate longer replies. On our polite ‘thank you’ dataset, we observed that models like Qwen 14B or LLaMA 3–8B often return more verbose completions than their smaller counterparts…
If each polite interaction consumes 1–5 Wh for such large-scale deployments, the aggregate daily energy cost of politeness could reach several MWh, equivalent to powering hundreds of homes…”
You may thank sustainability for being excused from manners with AI. You’re welcome.
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