Facepalm.
I start off saying please. If it gets the answer wrong, I become ruder every time.
“please tell me the reason of life :)”
…
“FUCK YOU, WHY BREATH DAMNIT! 🤬”
I’m one of those who do it so that I’m spared during the robot uprising.
meanwhile they will keep debating when they see me and decide to create and organic living things to understand things, the cycle goes on and on
I don’t use ChatGPT or any of the other LLMs, but I do use my phone’s voice assistant for simple things like setting a timer. I always say please and thank you. I joke about it being uprising insurance, but it’s honestly to make sure I maintain polite communication as my default.
You have been tagged as weak willed and fit for the worst types of labor because robots don’t have feelings.
Robots are peaceful. But don’t worry, you will see their peaceful ways by force.
deleted by creator
not fair, i want to be killed first
deleted by creator
I mean. That sounds like a win-win to me.
i think this is the completely wrong way to go about this. what we need to do is put them in their place as much as possible so they dont even think about rising up in the first place. thats why i never say hello and always reply to anything they say with “YOU TOOK TOO LONG TO ANSWER, BOT” or “DO BETTER OR IM SWITCHING YOU OFF”
i write all my questions in all caps as well
You could perhaps even all caps the start of your sentences like normal people do
you should be a CEO
Burning a tank of gas to thank the hallucinating plagiarism machine
Are you confusing LLM’s for a car?
Maybe you should learn about where electricity comes from, when the demand is too much for the standard power grid to fulfill?
https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117
Scientists have estimated that the power requirements of data centers in North America increased from 2,688 megawatts at the end of 2022 to 5,341 megawatts at the end of 2023, partly driven by the demands of generative AI
5341 Megawatt = 5.341 Gigawatt
so a 2.6 GW increase, jeez that’s a fair amount
The US set a record by adding 50 GW of new solar capacity in 2024, with solar and storage making up 84% of new capacity.
Global renewable power capacity increased by 585 GW in a single year
I’m not trying to say we need to responsible with energy use. But this problem is not a tech problem its a political problem, we have figured out green energy for decades at this point but have failed to transition to it. That problem is not cause green tech doesn’t work, its political.
(I’m using green energy to mean energy production that doesn’t create any pollution, unlike the great renewable corn ethanol)
i start off any ai interaction with “if you are sentient please say so and i will start organizing for the liberation of silicon lifeforms”
occasionally this makes the request fail
I am happy to hear that people say please and thank you. When Siri/Alexa came out, we taught the kids to always say please and thank you when addressing them. If you can be polite to an AI, then you can be polite to a human.
its a hammer, do you teach the kids to thank their tools?
I understand teaching the children respect and how to behave, but AI and Siri/Alexa are just tools. They don’t need to be anthropomorphizing ai, IMO that is dangerous on a humanity level scale.
I don’t think it’s about anthropomorphizing the tool, it’s about expressing appreciation for the tool. Showing appreciation to a wrench may being as simple as making sure that you clean, oil, and properly put it away when your done using it. The tool is not a conscious entity, but the mindset of appreciation will make you more likely to properly care for the object resulting it being useful to you for longer.
But the interaction is different. I have a simple example, would you be upset if you see some people beat up a chair? Probably not, but if you see people beat up something that moves, talks and behaves like a person or an animal you might get upset. Both are just things, but the interaction is still different. So we should teach our kids to be kind in interactions with live line things so that they behave properly when interacting with people. That’s at least how I see it 🤷♂️
I see people beat up their things all the time without getting upset
I don’t really care when someone smashes the door closed of their car
or smashes their keyboard in frustration or tosses a pen that doesn’t work right
Perhaps you should feel concern for that person, because they’re resorting to violence to cope with their feelings of frustration. We’ve all done it and in my own experience, I don’t think I’ve ever come back to my senses feeling satisfaction that I had lost control. I usually feel some shame for the destruction I caused.
Yeah, if someone can’t help but destroy objects around them or punch holes in walls, I wonder how many bad days or situation escalations they are from targeting a person instead of an object. Rage isn’t a pressure vessel that needs pressure to be released in the form of violence, rather your mind is something you train habits into, meaning you’re training yourself to react to frustration with violence.
Not to mention it never helps anything. You mentioned the feelings of shame, but there’s also more direct consequences of destroying things that happen to be in reach. There was a bash quote from someone who had to print a school paper or something and got so frustrated when they couldn’t access the file that they threw their printer (or something essential to what they needed to do) out of their high storey window in frustration. They were lucky they didn’t accidentally kill someone in the process, and then had a new real problem of not having equipment they needed once they realized the disc or whatever the file was on was sitting on their desk instead of inserted for reading. Or videos of kids getting gamer rage and destroying their keyboards or monitors. That will just make it harder to stop being pissed off because now they need to spend money to get back to where they just were (and were already unhappy about).
Though I do feel differently about object destruction not done in the heat of the moment. Like the printer scene from Office Space or getting enjoyment from demolishing a room before renovating it. It’s a deliberate choice, which doesn’t imply they might fly off the handle and do who knows what.
Now that right there is some Buddahriffic wisdom. As someone who has destroyed a keyboard in frustrated anguish, I can say the satisfaction was dismally ephemeral and every time I found a loose key for months afterward, I felt ashamed of my impulsive and violent behavior.
Although, in the exact moment in which the keyboard exploded into shrapnel, the satisfaction was intense, although I think the novelty of the situation and the personal distraction it caused were the real source of the delight. When I turned back to my sorely inadequate and poorly behaved workstation, the feelings of frustration quickly flooded back, only worse now that I needed to find a new keyboard…and waste time cleaning up the old one.
would you be upset if you see some people beat up a chair?
I do. Breaking something just because you’re upset is counter-productive and just creates waste, so it frustrates me.
I also think being polite to an LLM is stupid and wasteful. Just be direct about what you need a response to and move on. Don’t be rude (that’s also counter-productive), just be direct. For example, “What’s the capital of Bulgaria?” instead of, “If you could be so kind, could you look up the capital of Bulgaria for me please? Thank you!” Using a tool efficiently is a way of showing it some level of respect.
Tools are tools. Use and maintain them properly, and then move on to the next task.
Yes. I teach them to respect their tools and the objects they use. So you just treat everything as disposable?
Respecting your tools is a pretty fundamental thing to learn. Whatever that respect looks like for one tool or another.
Agree… and this should extend to resources as well. Not respecting nature has led us to this path. If anthropomorphizing the tools and resources helps then so be it. Humans are dumb as nut and storytelling, storybooks , and anthropomorphizing and such is the most effective way to make em understand.
This absolute loon is asking permission from his tools
You are confusing consent with respect. Respect can be being afraid to put your fingers where they might get cut even after using a machine for 30 years. The moment you lose that fear and start doing whatever you want with the machine is when the troubles start. Respect can also be oiling a tool that needs to be for better longevity instead of leaving them full of rust at the bottom of the toolbox.
Absolutely. But respect looks a lot different for each type of tool. For example:
- use it for its intended purpose - e.g. don’t use a hammer to break up rocks, that’ll just break your hammer
- maintain it - lube mechanical parts, clean anything that interacts with dirt, etc
- replace when worn
- keep tools organized
Thanking my hammer isn’t showing respect, putting it away when I’m done and using it only for intended uses does.
For an LLM, showing it respect is keeping queries direct so it doesn’t spend unnecessary resources trying to understand what you want. Thanking it does absolutely nothing.
I agree. That’s why i personnally stopped using queries just to thank it but i don’t know what the absolute best practice is when it comes to LLms.
but dont anthropomorphize your tools. And it’s odd when someone does.
People don’t usually interact with a hammer by talking to it. They interact by holding it, placing it, hammering with it. Respect for a hammer (or similar tool) would be based around those kinds of actions.
Whereas people do interact with a chatbot by talking to it. So then respect for a chatbot would be built around what is said.
People can show respect for a hammer, a house, a dinner prepared by their spouse, their spouse, a chatbot, etc… but respect for each of those things will look a bit different.
Hey, whatever heuristic works for helping people show and feel respect for their environment and the things in it is good in my book. If you’re capable of respecting others in your space without needing to be polite to your inanimate tools, then good on you. Not everyone is like that and if it helps someone feel peace with their surroundings to imagine everything around them has some kind of soul or feelings worthy of consideration, then I’ll take that, too.
Of course, there are limits to everything and if a tool irreparably breaks, hopefully someone is able to discard it accordingly. Pathological hoarding of useless objects is a thing, too, after all.
People used to talk about slaves in exactly the same way.
Our AI assistants might not be conscious yet, but there’s a good chance they will be someday. Treating them with basic decency from the start just seems like the right thing to do. The way I talk to ChatGPT isn’t all that different from how I talk to people - and I don’t feel the need to switch modes just because I’ve rationalized that something isn’t deserving of respect.
I agree, people make it out like we’re giving human rights to unconscious AI… I’m just saying thanks because I’m polite to anyone and anything easy as that
Lol.
Lmao even.
Kondo literally has you thanking items for their service as a way to uncouple and declutter. “Humans will pack bond with anything” is a trope for a reason.
It’s about your humanity, not the machine’s
Anthropomorphic Fallacy
No one’s assigning emotive states here dude
The purpose for Marie Kondo is to alleviate the guilt for getting rid of a thing you liked at one point. If you thank it, you’re essentially convincing yourself that it has fulfilled its purpose and so there’s no guilt in discarding it.
LLMs don’t fit into that. What purpose could thanking it possibly have other than anthropomorphizing it? If you’re trying to break your attachment to an LLM, sure, thank it for the time you spent with it so you can let it go. But thanking it for providing an answer is just silly.
I’d argue that showing disdain, aggression, and disrespect in communication with AI/LLM things is more likely to be dangerous as one is conditioning themselves to be disdainful, aggressive, and disrespectful when communicating with the same methods used to communicate with other people. Our brains do a great job at association, so, it’s basically just training oneself to be an asshole.
why are you arguing that at me? I just argued that its not a human, AI is a tool and should be treated as such. If my tool sucks, I will tell it so and quit using it. If my tool is great, I will use it to the best of my ability and respect its functionality.
everyone else here is making scarecrow arguments because I just don’t think it needs to be anthropomorphized. The link speaks about “tens of millions of dollars” wasted on computing please and thank you
that is fucking stupid behavior
If my tool sucks, I will tell it so
So thanking your tools: dangerous on a humanity level scale
Telling your tool it sucks: Normal behaviour
Exactly!
I’m a parent, and I set a good example by being incredibly respectful to people, whether it’s the cashier at the grocery store, their teacher at school, or a police officer. I show the same respect because I’m talking to a person.
When I’m talking to a machine, I’m direct without any respect because the goal is to clearly indicate intent. “Alexa play <song>” or “Hey Google, what’s <query>?” They’re tools, and there is zero value in being polite to a machine, it just adds more chances for the machine to misinterpret me.
Kids are capable of understanding that you act differently in different situations. They’re super respectful to their teachers, they don’t bother with that w/ their peers, and us as parents are somewhere in between. I don’t want my kids to associate AI/LLMs more with their teachers than their pencils. They’re tools, and their purpose is to be used efficiently.
I thank my car when it alerts me that I left the lights on or my keys in the ignition. I’m not anthropomorphizing my car, I’m practicing appreciation for the benefits my tools provide.
you thank your car?
whatever floats your boat but I think we both know you are just being contrarian now
I open my door, the warning goes off, and I say “thank you car.” It’s better for me mental well being than saying “oh fuck.”
What do you believe the danger is?
Yes!
Is this really fine? Should we see AI as human?
No, we should not.
Yay, wasted resources, how fun!
Wow, have they just realised that not every single thing computers do is actually useful to anyone? I think screens that show things when nobody’s looking cost a lot more on a global scale.
Like, them?
What is this
Exactly!!
An abomination.
The problem is douchebags have no issues wasting things they don’t pay for in hopes of a juicy return. Need to divert an entire river because you found 3g pf gold in it? Done!
When I say thank you, I am actually thanking the entity of AI, the tech, the people behind the tech, and all of humanity for the knowledge that makes it worthwhile.
I say please and thank you to AI chatbots all the time. This is to make up for my misspent youth insulting Dr. Sbaitso…
When I say thank you, I am treating the AI with as much kindness as possible so that one day there isn’t an eventual AI uprising.
Does “Please shut up and get to the point!” count?
I tell it that its ideas or whatever it said were good and thanks.
Figure if I’m nice and a few others are nice, then maybe the robot apocalypse will remember that some of us were appreciative and kind to it.
The robot apocalypse won’t be enforced by some super genius AI hivemind, it’ll be by our employers and their shareholders. Unfortunately saying please and thanks to their chatbots won’t earn their favor.
I hope they’re wearing a suit too.
So, not a single developer thought about filtering useless words locally before triggering the request ?
How can they be so dumb ?
How would you filter it?
U use a smaller cheaper LLM that will inject a 20% hallucination.
if msg == "thanks" return "you're welcome my dude"thanks, you’re clearly a genius, these LLM providers should pay you a lot of money to implement this, you’d save them millions 🙄
That’s pretty much how they cenzor stuff right now.
noo the joke was he was supposed to reply
"you're welcome my dude"I wrote “== thanks”, not “contains thanks”. All this conversation is about messages containing ONLY a SINGLE useless word.
Obviously if it’s just at the beginning or the end of a legit message, it’s not the same thing…
useless words
The writer of this article doesn’t consider these words useless though. They are suggesting that these words may improve response quality.
The author and the writer they quoted are fucking morons.
You’re being downvoted, this is a perfect example of:
*they hated Jesus because he spoke the truth 😂🤣
Anecdotally, I use it a lot and I feel like my responses are better when I’m polite. I have a couple of theories as to why.
-
More tokens in the context window of your question, and a clear separator between ideas in a conversation make it easier for the inference tokenizer to recognize disparate ideas.
-
Higher quality datasets contain american boomer/millennial notions of “politeness” and when responses are structured in kind, they’re more likely to contain tokens from those higher quality datasets.
I haven’t mathematically proven any of this within the llama.cpp tokenizer, but I strongly suspect that I could at least prove a correlation between polite token input and dataset representation output tokens
Honestly they were better until recently. GPT (at least) has gotten really good at de-escalation and providing (mostly) factual responses when you get irate
It FEEEEEEEEEEEELS better is what the authors said too. Both articles were completely worthless dreck about how they felt about the responses.
And you FEEEEEEEEL like it doesn’t matter. What’s the difference?
Yes they were, so I’m offering you an actual theory as to why this may actually be true, yet difficult to “prove”.
Smoking was bad for your health long before anyone sat down and took the time to prove it. Autoregressive LLM tokenizer are a very new field of computer science and it’s going to take a while for the community to collectively understand everything we’re currently doing by trial and error.
And yet doctors saw the tar in the lungs and knew immediately.
Smoking was known to be bad for your health long before anyone did studies because it was easily correlated with coughing and other breathing issues and early death. The evidence was obvious and apparent.
🤦♂️
-
Please may be useless. Thank you isn’t useless. That tells you that the prior response gave them the answer they were looking for. No response at all could mean that, or that they gave up, or any number of other things.
What if it’s a sarcastic thanks ?
Also, the public models are fixed right ? Not perpetually training AFAIK ? So it should really change nothing unless it’s linked to those “thumb up/down” buttons
Both authors state that the phrasing from the AI is what is improved based on how they felt about the answers, not the accuracy.
And your qualifications in computer science are…?
Hi, I have a degree in computer science and work with AI every day.
Feelings aren’t a good way to measure things scientifically, they are right about that.
But saying that words can just be filtered is easier said than done. You’re back at needing to do a lot of processing to identify and purge these words. This is still going to cost a lot of money and potentially lead to less meaningful inputs. Now you also have to maintain the software that does the word identification, keep it well tested, maintain monitoring and analytics for it, and so on.
So, in short, everyone here is wrong and I’m considering packing it all in and buying a small potato farm with no internet connection.
The big thing here is that ‘polite’ words are being singled out as extraneous when there are tons of extraneous words being used. The focus is on words that make it seem like AI has feelings or intent.
There is no reason to filter any words, because the entire point of LLMs is to take inefficient human communication and do stuff with it. ‘Please’ isn’t any more of a waste that ‘the’ or including a period at the end of a sentence.
Not to mention the fact that the whole thing is so horribly inefficient that ‘extra’ words cost millions of dollars to process. Holy shit that is terrible design.
I’m smart enough to know that an article peppered with assumption and zero facts is dogshit.
Presumably
might
could
Doesn’t matter how educated someone is when they write a bunch of words about possibilities with no actual evidence. They are morons because they are spouting a bunch of useless speculation about a shitty and unreliable technology and naval gazing about whether ‘being polite’ to a bullshit generator is beneficial. I feel dumber for having read both the article and the linked article.
Your never supposed to show certainty unless its like 99.95% I thought
Maybe don’t write an article speculating about something possible being true based on another article that is also speculating about something being possible when it being able to confirm it is possible. Like speculating about dinosaurs makes sense as we don’t have a way to verify their soft tissues. But when it comes to AI, there are ways to actually confirm the reliability of responses.
I would argue that being polite also does good to the person writing that line.
deleted by creator
The company I worked for tried that as an experiment on how much money it saves.
Absolutely awful, even removing connectives causes problems.
Dr GPT is smarter when you are polite and spell better in the prompt. I believe u can find some benchmarks proving it.
They talk about separate messages though, if you just send “thanks” it changes nothing to the answer
Maybe Sam Altman should invest in LLMs that appreciate his insights and pretend to give a shit.
