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.
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?
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.
I’m not seeing a problem here.
Me too. If Chatgpt is like this, it won’t be as controversial as Google’s glue pizza.
Mountains from mole hills
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.
Don’t they charge per token?
So they’re also making money every time somebody says please or thank you…
They are purely losing money
The only money they make is from boosting their stock aka future potential value
It’s by usage via API, but all-you-can-eat via web UI
As far as I know, they lose money on every prompt, even with the $200/mo “Pro” subscription.
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.
I’m not sure how to interpret your counterpoint. Can you clarify? It’s an unprofitable business model unless people pay and don’t use it?
My point was that “lose money on every prompt” would be true in a technical sense regardless of how much people were paying for a subscription. The subscription money is money in, and the cost of calculations is money out. It’s still money out regardless of what is coming in.
As for whether the business is profitable or not, it’s not so easy to tell unless you’re an insider. Companies like this basically never make a ‘profit’ on paper, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t enriching themselves. They are counting their own pay as part of the costs, and they set their pay to whatever they like. They are also counting various research and expansion efforts as part of the cost. So yeah, they might not have any excess money to pay dividends to shareholders, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t profitable.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
When Chatgpt 1st shook the tech world, 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) have been my go-to llm but when in a hurry, I just use the Gemini voice assistant or Meta ai – I have the Messenger app.
You never know…
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
So, not a single developer thought about filtering useless words locally before triggering the request ?
How can they be so dumb ?
The company I worked for tried that as an experiment on how much money it saves.
Absolutely awful, even removing connectives causes problems.
useless words
The writer of this article doesn’t consider these words useless though. They are suggesting that these words may improve response quality.
I would argue that being polite also does good to the person writing that line.
deleted by creator
The author and the writer they quoted are fucking morons.
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.
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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.
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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
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.
🤦♂️
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
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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.
You’re being downvoted, this is a perfect example of:
*they hated Jesus because he spoke the truth 😂🤣
And your qualifications in computer science are…?
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.
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.
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
How would you filter it?
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…
U use a smaller cheaper LLM that will inject a 20% hallucination.
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! 🤬”
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
An abomination.
Exactly!!
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!
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
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)
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 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 think robots and their logic will be even less impressed by billionaire arguments than humans are.
They are implementing AI at work next week. I’m super excited to see how wrong it goes.
Yay, wasted resources, how fun!
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.
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.
Maybe Sam Altman should invest in LLMs that appreciate his insights and pretend to give a shit.
Is this really fine? Should we see AI as human?
No, we should not.
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.
