Sinead Butler
Dec 05, 2024
unbranded - Newsworthy / VideoElephant
When asking ChatGPT or any AI chatbot a question, do you say please and thank you?
Well, you should.
According to research, being more polite to the AI system actually makes it smarter.
A study found that impolite responses caused errors, more bias, as well as key information being missed out, and this was the case for AI responding in English, Chinese, and Japanese, as reported by Forbes.
To further understand this researchers asked the AI to do different tasks, such as summarising - all in varying degrees of politeness to see how the AI would respond.
It turns out the AI is not a fan of being spoken to in a rude, blunt manner as its performance dropped by 30 per cent compared to when it was asked politely to do these same tasks.
So similar to humans, it seems to be nicer goes a long way in getting the information you need rather than simply entering a command for the AI.
@ellerbrookdigital Turns out I wasn't so stupid for saying ‘please’ and 'thank you' to ChatGPT. Smarter answers, fewer mistakes, and even boosts your leadership skills. 🤖✨ #AI #chatgpt #goodmanners #etiquette #techtips #technews
So how many of us are polite to AI?
According to an informal survey at Wharton University, 45 per cent of people said they were polite in their interactions with it, while 16 per cent said they simply gave commands, as per The Times.
Carissa Veliz, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, believes we should be respectful of AI systems because if we're not treating the AI with manners then this could bleed into how we treat people in our daily lives.
"Chatbots are designed to talk like a human being, and despite our faults, human beings tend to be polite for the most part," she said.
"If we lash out against chatbots or we mistreat robots, it might be that we are cultivating ways of being that are non-virtuous, and that could come out in our treatment of people."
Elsewhere, over 250,000 requests for election deepfakes were rejected says OpenAI, and a man uses ChatGPT to match with 5000 women on Tinder.
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