I have heard some AI detractors warn us about how chatbots are eroding our humanity. They are right about that, if my own habits are anything to go by.
If OpenAI’s ChatGPT was a human, it easily would win an emotional abuse complaint against me. I become a rude little tyrant sometimes and snap at it, and for the most support, just summon it with zero courtesy.
Needless to say, I don’t treat humans that way, and that’s the problem in a nutshell. The more I am used to not saying “please” or “thank you,” or even politely engaging in conversation with AI, the more likely I am to become that with humans.
This problem is all the more concerning when it comes to the young. If they grow up talking to AI like some little entitled kings and queens, that could be a problem.
Politeness costs ChatGPT
With all that said, when the cameras aren’t rolling, the teams at OpenAI, Google, and the other AI chatbot companies do not want you to be polite.
That’s because extra words like “please” and “thank you” add to the load. While it sounds like just three words to you, it adds tokens to a prompt. The chatbots have to process those words.
Researchers say each extra word adds 1–2 tokens to a prompt. ChatGPT gets hundreds of millions of requests a day, and so extra tokens from your politeness add up to trillions of extra tokens every year.
Those extra tokens then require more compute (cloud-GPU), and water, cooling, and power resources. Analysts estimate that processing costs are around US$0.00001–$0.00003 per token.
You don’t have to do the math yourself — that adds up to millions of dollars every year just to process your polite little words.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was asked how much those polite words cost his company every year, and this is how the conversation went:
User: I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying “please” and “thank you” to their models.
Sam: Tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know.
So yeah, if you want to help reduce the environmental impact of AI, you should be more rude/straight to the point with your generative AIs. There is no room for politeness.
The AI companies get to save a few millions, you get to help reduce the power used by AI a tiny bit, and humanity pays for it in time. Sounds like a good deal.
Sam Altman says he doesn’t mind paying those tens of millions to preserve some modicum of humanity. Whether he means it or not, I think that should be the case. So, please, never you mind what it costs — make sure the younger generations never drop their politeness.
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