It costs nothing to be polite unless you're talking to ChatGPT - then it costs tens of millions

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Once again, the more hidden costs of the AI revolution are under the spotlight, and in this case, specifically it's the topic of how much simply being polite to ChatGPT might run to.

What's being talked about here is, for example, saying thank you to the chatbot, an extra 'query' that ChatGPT processes and responds to, and how much that actually costs in terms of the electricity used therein.

That question was posed by a denizen of X, Tomie, and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, actually responded to it directly as you can see above (hat tip to TechRadar for picking up on this).

The electric bill for basic pleasantries directed towards ChatGPT's various models is apparently 'tens of millions of dollars' and Altman quips that it's money 'well spent' (adding 'you never know').

Why might it be well spent? Well, an obvious theory is that OpenAI's Large Language Models are, of course, slowly learning and picking up knowledge with every query and interaction with human beings. So, in this case, ChatGPT is going to be learning that humans are polite and reasonable creatures. (Other human queries may point very far away from that conclusion, mind, but you get the idea).

Therefore, looking down the road to a future where ChatGPT, or whatever these AI models turn into, become far more capable, it's not surprising that there's no shortage of comments about how it's worthwhile bowing and scraping to AI now, before it becomes our future overlord.

Seriously, there are a fair few responses on that X thread which are actually along the lines of 'well it doesn't hurt to be nice to ChatGPT, as it might remember this, and who knows what it'll be in the future.'

Who knows indeed.

Also, there are acknowledgements that it just feels nice to be polite, and seeing as ChatGPT is pretending to be, well, an artificial intelligence (very different to an LLM), when you interact with another 'entity' it only feels natural to treat it as you'd want to be treated yourself.

There may also be a subtle benefit in that polite and well-written prompts elicit more reliable responses from ChatGPT, as TechRadar observes. That doesn't really extend to a courtesy thank you to close a conversation session, though.

It's clear enough that those politeness-related extra prompts and responses do have a real cost to the world in terms of power usage, so there is also an argument for being more abrupt with an AI (LLM) just in terms of the eco-friendly aspect of that way of engaging (or not engaging).

Tomie certainly seems to have a sense of humor when it comes to replying to Altman's response, thanking OpenAI's models which they say they've found useful to employ in 'complex tasks' like understanding the different LLM names. Ouch...

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