Being polite to artificial intelligence can appear innocuous, but there is a hefty price tag on it.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, shared recently that a mere “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT has put millions of dollars in the red for the firm. Altman shared this as a response on X (previously Twitter) to a person who asked what the energy bill was associated with users being good-mannered to AI technologies.
Tens of millions of dollars well spent—you never know,” Altman answered, underlining the underlying costs of human-AI interactions.
The Impact of Polite Conversations on AI Energy Consumption
Generative AI models like ChatGPT have massive energy requirements, especially for model training and live conversations. Each polite conversation could be seen as minor but adds to the energy consumption of the AI in total.
Kurtis Beavers, a Microsoft Copilot design team director, described in a WorkLab memo how employing simple manners such as using “please” and “thank you” when dealing with AI “helps create respectful, collaborative outputs.” Beavers added that AI systems frequently reflect the users’ professionalism, emphasis, and tone and hinted that politeness might result in better and polished answers.
Why Users Are Polite to AI: Fear or Habit
Surprisingly, courtesy to AI is not always about good manners. A study by Future (parent company of TechRadar) in December 2024 found that politeness towards AI is frequently motivated by more subtle emotions.
The poll, which had more than 1,000 respondents, discovered that 67% of United States AI users and 71% of United Kingdom AI users remain polite when they interact with chatbots. Most of them mentioned brevity as the cause of impoliteness at times. Furthermore, about 12% of the respondents confessed they are polite to AI because they fear the repercussions in the future — perhaps envisioning situations where AI “remembers” human actions.
This data suggests that users treat AI interactions seriously, considering future ramifications despite knowing AI lacks consciousness.
The Environmental Impact of AI Conversations
While the idea of politeness toward a chatbot may seem amusing, it has real-world environmental consequences. Generative AI is power-hungry and needs lots of electricity to compute each inquiry. For instance, a University of California study, which The Washington Post cited, discovered that using AI to produce a simple 100-word email uses approximately 0.14 kilowatt-hours of energy—enough to illuminate 14 LED lights for an hour.
If an individual were to send one email per week for a year that was AI-synthesized, it would amount to 7.5 kilowatt-hours, equivalent to the energy used by nine Washington, D.C. homes in one hour.
With millions of daily AI experiences globally, the overall energy usage is mind-boggling. As AI penetration deepens into regular life, its carbon footprint is likely to increase even further.
The Ripple Effect: Small Words, Big Costs
Each gracious interaction—each “thank you” and “please”—is one more token parsed by big language models. Though tiny, those tokens add up to substantial computation, causing increased energy usage in the long run.
Whereas Sam Altman views the expense as “well spent,” the larger implications underscore a necessary discussion of the hidden environmental costs of AI, such as how seemingly small behavior patterns can add up to enormous resource expenditures.
Would Politeness Make AI Interactions Better?
In spite of the ecological effect, specialists such as Kurtis Beavers consider it necessary to be polite to AI in order to enhance the quality of interaction. “Applying common manners when communicating with AI assists in creating polite, collaborative results,” Beavers repeated.
Polite customers can be rewarded with more considerate and professional answers, making AI a more effective tool for communication. This approach positions politeness not only as good etiquette but as a strategic means to maximize AI utility.
The Future of AI Manners and Energy Efficiency
As technology advances with AI, the developers might look to weigh energy efficiency against quality interaction. The future AI systems could be more intelligent to process language with higher efficiency, understanding brevity without compromising the tone or quality of answers. Society may also have to deal with new manners when using non-human systems, particularly if environmental issues keep increasing.
While uttering “please” and “thank you” to AI systems such as ChatGPT seems innocuous politeness, it surprisingly amounts to millions of dollars in operational expenses and high energy usage.
Sam Altman’s comments remind us that small, seemingly innocuous behaviors have scale consequences, and as AI increasingly becomes a larger part of our existence, both energy sustainability and human-AI etiquette will continue to be important areas of attention.
