Polite AI Prompts Come at a Surprising Environmental and Financial Cost:

As humans, we know how to be courteous, and while it doesn’t have an exact value, it certainly is priceless. If we shift our focus to artificial intelligence, courtesy can prove to be extremely expensive. As OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman shared recently, saying “please” or “thank you” to chatbots comes at the expense of millions of dollars in energy costs. According to Altman, “Tens of Millions of dollars well spent - a figure of speech indeed!"

ALT’s light hearted comment sparked the discussion of how artificial intelligence interacts with humans, leading to the unsolved mysteries of underlying AI costs triggered by soft phrases.

Why being polite to AI matters
AI Developers and researchers strongly believe that polite language impacts the technologies reaction. Kurtis Beavers, a Microsoft Design Manager, shared that polite prompts yield more thoughtful and collaborative responses from AI models, showing increased user courtesy. Owing to the nature of AI systems, which are built to repeat the user’s structure and tone, user courtesy is critical for shaping positivity for the future.

In late 2024, a survey found out that more than 67% of Americans believe in being polite with AI. While most respondents claimed good manners to be the reason, 12% admitted that they are being cautious - what if AI takes over?

The Ecological Impact of Courteous Prompts

In terms of social interaction, courtesy manners in AI is an area of concern for the environment. A Washington Post investigation uncovered that generating a 100-word response from an AI takes enough electricity to power 14 LED lights for an hour. With millions of interactions every day, those additional socially polite phrases here and there might capture a portion of the new energy demand.

Data centers that support the operations of AI models like ChatGPT currently utilize approximately 2% of global energy use and ChatGPT's data centers alone consumes two percent of energy. This number is only set to rise with increased AI usage in society.

Striking The Balance of Courtesy And Environment

Cleaning up prompts versus improving the experience brings to the forefront the strategic prompt engineering triage of operational workload. When the concern is dealing with energy intensive tasks such as AI operations, it may be prudent to scale back on courtesy prompts and tailor the experience towards efficiency.

Next time you are typing a long-winded and overly polite prompt remember that conciseness may serve to be a more prudent option for self, the AI, and the environment.