A survey found 70% of users are polite to AI, but OpenAI's Sam Altman estimated politeness tokens cost tens of millions annually. Clear prompts beat polite ones.
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Millions of people now say please and thank you to AI. A survey by Future found that 70% of people are polite when talking to AI, with many saying it simply feels like the right way to behave. The more human these systems sound, the more users treat them as social beings rather than tools.
Critics argue that extra words such as please and thank you consume tokens, computing power and energy, while encouraging users to project feelings and consciousness onto systems that don't have either. The tension between natural social habit and efficient tool use is not trivial – it affects prompt design, energy cost and the quality of AI output.
Early research suggested that polite prompts often produced more thoughtful, detailed and balanced answers, while rude or abrupt prompts sometimes led to shorter and less useful responses. The mechanism is straightforward: AI models are trained on vast amounts of human language. In human conversation, polite requests often appear in contexts where people provide more careful, helpful responses. Rude or dismissive language often appears in contexts where the reply is defensive, blunt or low-effort. AI picks up on those patterns.
The BBC has reported on research suggesting that calling an AI “smart” can encourage it to think longer and more carefully about its answers, potentially improving its output. Microsoft has also advised users that being polite to Copilot can help generate more respectful and collaborative outputs.
This does not mean AI has an ego. It means tone is part of the instruction set. When you frame a request politely and clearly, you may be giving the system a better sense of the response you want. The polite framing acts as a contextual signal that the desired output should be thorough, respectful and well-structured.
AI systems process language by breaking it into tokens, and every token requires computing power. A single “please” or “thank you” may seem trivial, AI operates at enormous scale. When millions of users add extra words to billions of prompts, the cumulative cost could become significant.
No one has calculated the exact global energy cost of AI politeness. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was asked about the cost of people saying please and thank you to ChatGPT, he joked that it was probably tens of millions of dollars “well spent.” The real issue is that as AI use grows, even small inefficiencies can add up.
The table shows that while individual polite words are negligible, the aggregate cost at platform scale is material. Newer AI models may make politeness less important by better identifying intent behind a prompt and separating useful instructions from conversational padding.
As more daily conversations happen with machines, the habits users build matter. If people spend large parts of the day issuing blunt commands to systems that respond obediently, could that make them more impolite and impatient in human conversations?
Manners help slow down, show consideration and communicate more clearly. Even when the recipient is a machine, those habits may still matter because they reinforce the kind of communicator a person wants to be.
The counterargument is equally strong. AI is a tool, and treating it like a person risks confusing the relationship. Users don't say please to a spreadsheet, apologize to a search engine or compliment a screwdriver for doing a good job. Chatbots may sound warm, thoughtful or even charming, they are still software systems processing data and generating language. They do not understand politeness in the human sense.
When users treat AI as though it deserves manners, they may be projecting consciousness onto systems that do not have it. That may seem harmless, it can subtly change how people perceive technology. The more human AI feels, the easier it becomes to overtrust it, emotionally attach to it or forget that its answers can be wrong.
The answer to whether to be polite to AI also depends on which AI you are using. Different systems are trained, tuned and governed in different ways.
Even within the same AI product, behavior can vary. Models are updated, settings change and organizations can fine-tune systems for different use cases. A customer service chatbot, a coding assistant and an internal HR tool may all respond differently to the same tone.
As AI systems become more personalized, they may remember user preferences, communication style and past interactions. That does not mean they will hold grudges or reward good manners, it does mean the way users interact with AI could influence the kind of experience it builds around them over time.
The most efficient approach is to be clear rather than polite. The best prompt may not be “Could you please be so kind as to help me draft this email?” It may simply be “Draft a friendly email to a client explaining the delay and suggesting a new delivery date.”
The truth is that there is still a lot unknown about AI, and one of the biggest mysteries is why manners sometimes seem to be important other times don't. As the systems evolve, they are increasingly being designed to analyze prompts and accurately extract the user's intent, rather than emotional tones or social pleasantries.
Far from being meaningless, the way users speak to AI clearly shapes the tone, quality and feel of interactions with it, particularly as AI becomes fine-tuned towards specific tasks and personalized by having a memory. AI doesn't have feelings that can be hurt, although it can simulate the reaction of something that does. As systems become more human and more deeply embedded in lives, the habits and behaviors users adopt are likely to evolve with them.
The real question might not be how manners affect machines, how the way people treat machines impacts the way they treat other people.
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