Mind Your Manners

What is the price of being polite to ChatGPT?

- THEO BURMAN

SAYING "PLEASE" AND "THANK you" to ChatGPT emerged primarily as a form of social etiquette combined with a superstition that, one day, an AI overlord might be able to know if you were nice to it or not. But is it effective? And did you know it comes at a cost?

Few tech companies have managed to become synonymous with their industry, but OpenAI has succeeded in doing so with the most important technology in modern times: artificial intelligence. ChatGPT has cemented itself as the go-to generative AI and, as of 2025, remains the most-used AI chatbot on the market.

Its widespread adoption in both everyday life and the private sector has created a new market for the best prompts and phrases to get the most out of the AI. LinkedIn and X, formerly Twitter, are now full of content creators and professionals alike, all promising 10 easy tips to get better responses from ChatGPT.

But one of the most popular tactics to encourage the AI isn't based on the right language or the formatting of the prompt, but rather how polite the user is.

In a 2024 survey on the official ChatGPT subreddit community, many users said that they simply wanted to be polite to the bot, with one user writing: “It is basically wasted, but hey, it's nice to be nice.”

“I'm always nice just in case the AIs take over the world, and I hope they remember that I was always nice to AI,” another person wrote.

Give A Little Respect

But there is evidence to suggest that saying your pleases and thank yous to ChatGPT can provide you with better responses to your queries.

In a memo on the creation of Microsoft's Copilot AI, design team director Kurtis Beavers said that being polite sets an agenda that generative AIs mimic, meaning if you're polite and helpful, the response will be helpful too.