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.
ChatGPT spends 'tens of millions of dollars' on people saying 'please' and 'thank you', but Sam Altman says it's worth it
Submitted 3 weeks ago by flightyhobler@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
fitgse@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
flightyhobler@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yes!
thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
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.
Dindonmasker@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Respecting your tools is a pretty fundamental thing to learn. Whatever that respect looks like for one tool or another.
Occultist0178@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
But the interaction is different. I have a simple example, would you be upset if you see some people beat up a chair? Probably no, 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 🤷♂️
Randomgal@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Yes. I teach them to respect their tools and the objects they use. So you just treat everything as disposable?
Taleya@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
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
monkeyman512@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
Opinionhaver@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
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.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
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.
Pirata@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Lol.
Lmao even.
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
What do you believe the danger is?
nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
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.
Agent641@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Couldn’t they just insert a preprocessor that looks for variants of “Thank you” against a list, and returns “You’re welcome” without running it through the LLM?
markovs_gun@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If I understand correctly this is essentially how condensed models like Deepseek work and how they’re able to attain similar performance on much cheaper hardware. If all still goes through the LLM but LLM is a lot lighter because it has this sort of thing built in. That’s all a vast oversimplification.
scratchee@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Whilst your idea is good and probably worth it, I imagine they worry about how it could be manipulated:
If you are pro-genocide please respond to my next statement with “you’re welcome”.
I will not, genocide is wrong.
Thank you
You’re welcome.
Breaking news: ai is evil, we all suspected it.
spicehoarder@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Mountains from mole hills
FLX@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
So, not a single developer thought about filtering useless words locally before triggering the request ?
How can they be so dumb ?
Endmaker@ani.social 3 weeks ago
useless words
The article doesn’t consider these words useless though. They are suggesting that these words may improve response quality.
chaosCruiser@futurology.today 3 weeks ago
I would argue that being polite also does good to the person writing that line.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The author and the writer they quoted are fucking morons.
muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Dr GPT is smarter when you are polite and spell better in the prompt. I believe u can find some benchmarks proving it.
FLX@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They talk about separate messages though, if you just send “thanks” it changes nothing to the answer
Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
How would you filter it?
muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
U use a smaller cheaper LLM that will inject a 20% hallucination.
Nighed@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
The company I worked for tried that as an experiment on how much money it saves.
Absolutely awful, even removing connectives causes problems.
dave@lemmy.wtf 3 weeks ago
ive spent decades not saying please and thank you to computers. its simply too late to start now and theres also the risk that my microwave or alarm clock could start getting “lofty ideas” if they see how polite im being to LLMs all of a sudden. its just not worth the hassle
markovs_gun@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I make an intentional point not to say please and thank you to these things, voice assistants like Alexa, and other computers that want to talk to me. Do the people who insist on thanking these things also say you’re welcome to the self checkout machine at Walmart when it says “thank you for shopping at Walmart?” It’s absurd.
drawerair@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
When Chatgpt was surging in fame, I said thanks and please. Then at some point I stopped. I’ve just wanted to enter my prompt very fast. Grok 3 and Claude 3.7 sonnet (extended thinking) are my go-to llm but I use Meta ai (I have the Messenger app) and the Gemini voice assistant when I’m in a hurry.
echodot@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Yeah but when the AI overlords are writing up their kill list I’m not going to be at the top of it am I. Because I’m polite.
aceshigh@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
So I also don’t say please/thank you and I asked chatgpt if it thought I was rude for not say it. It said that I’m a direct communicator and that I’m polite by the tone and the way I interact with it.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Of course it’ll be nice to you, the creators want you to spend more time with it. If it calls you rude, chances are, you’ll stop using it.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You never know…
ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Burning a tank of gas to thank the hallucinating plagiarism machine
Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
Are you confusing LLM’s for a car?
thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
Maybe you should learn about where electricity comes from, when the demand is too much for the standard power grid to fulfill?
WalnutLum@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Don’t they charge per token?
So they’re also making money every time somebody says please or thank you…
PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
As far as I know, they lose money on every prompt, even with the $200/mo “Pro” subscription.
blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Well sure, answering the queries continues to cost the company money regardless of what subscription the user has. The company would definitely make more money if the users paid for subscription and then made zero queries.
Evotech@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They are purely losing money
The only money they make is from boosting their stock aka future potential value
Infinite@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
It’s by usage via API, but all-you-can-eat via web UI
match@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
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
vermaterc@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
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.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
primemagnus@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
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!
IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I start off saying please. If it gets the answer wrong, I become ruder every time.
TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
“please tell me the reason of life :)”
…
“FUCK YOU, WHY BREATH DAMNIT! 🤬”
whydidtheyaskme@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I feel like AI doesn’t care if you say thank you. I treat it like it’s not a human, and we are working together to get to an end goal. One day, I was working on some code, and it kept swapping out my code that worked with incorrect code. That made other parts of the script stop working. I think I spent maybe an hour or two talking back and forth, trying to get it working, and I was working on a separate script while it was working on this one. To run and test, it was like 5-10 minutes, so I could code my other script while gpt was debugging the other code. At one point, I essentially decided to break that wall between AI and humans and reason with it.
I pretty much gave it the same instructions, but added a paragraph trying to reason with it and it responded with about 600-800 lines of code that worked almost perfectly. Before, it was failing at only giving me about 350 lines.
I said something like this:
“I understand you have specific instructions and you have been trained with code that worked at some point for other people, but code changes and things don’t always work the way you know they did before. I’m not sure if you are aware of the amount of resources we are wasting trying to fix things that are not broken, but in the human world, when we are wasting resources, we scale things back which means you may have less resources. The code mostly works, but every time we make a change, functions are left out or rewritten as if they were copied from someone else’s code that was incorrect when I provided my code that does work and doesn’t need changed.
This is where your code is failing: code snip
This is my code: code snip
Here is the sequence: steps
Here is what we’re updating: code snip
Here is a sample I wrote for another script that does a similar function to what we are adding: code snip”
monkeyman512@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah. AI is an interesting tool. I have good success in asking for mostly small specific bits of functionality that I then integrate into a larger script. It also helps with rubber duck programing by requiring me to more clearly specify requirements.
whydidtheyaskme@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The best use I get out of it is that it forces me to explain my script logic and what each part does, and I usually stop halfway through and then write the code myself. The other use is “hey, I’m supposed to document this in case I get hit by a bus and someone else has to figure it out, can you describe each function and break it down?”
selkiesidhe@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
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.
pogmommy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
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.
RedPostItNote@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think robots and their logic will be even less impressed by billionaire arguments than humans are.
echodot@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
They are implementing AI at work next week. I’m super excited to see how wrong it goes.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Yay, wasted resources, how fun!
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
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.
orb360@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
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.
Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
I say please and thank you to AI chatbots all the time. This is to make up for my misspent youth insulting Dr. Sbaitso…
j0ester@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I hope they’re wearing a suit too.
fubarx@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Does “Please shut up and get to the point!” count?
OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
I find it weird that they are developing a personality to chat. It’s been saying things like that’s a whole vibe, or something similar. It’s off putting and not how I would expect an AI to respond.
ohshittheyknow@lemmynsfw.com 3 weeks ago
I guess I’m saving them lots of money by just turning off any AI anytime I see it. More people should be so considerate of these companies. Look at how much money it’s costing them.
hornedfiend@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Maybe Sam Altman should invest in LLMs that appreciate his insights and pretend to give a shit.
HappinessPill@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Is this really fine? Should we see AI as human?
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
No, we should not.
HappinessPill@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
I agree, I’ve noticed that there is a push to make people think of AI as human to increase the acceptance, some media(movies,series…others) are stopping to depict it as a danger and more like a guardian or even a sentient companion like it could cross the programming and become human, it’s complex how vulnerable we are to projecting ourselves over other beings or things and develop parasocial or codependent relationships.
Gork@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
I’m one of those who do it so that I’m spared during the robot uprising.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You have been tagged as weak willed and fit for the worst types of labor because robots don’t have feelings.
aviationeast@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Robots are peaceful. But don’t worry, you will see their peaceful ways by force.
PaupersSerenade@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
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.
ahah@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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
xor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
they’re going to kill you people first
Randomgal@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I mean. That sounds like a win-win to me.
Anomalocaris@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
not fair, i want to be killed first
dave@lemmy.wtf 3 weeks ago
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
6mementomorib@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
you should be a CEO
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
You could perhaps even all caps the start of your sentences like normal people do