Some have no qualms about treating ChatGPT like their servant; ‘Just like humans, AI can’t always be the bigger person.’
4 min
California couple Vikas Choudhary and Ridhi Sahni can’t agree on one thing: How polite must one be with ChatGPT?
Choudhary, the founder of an artificial intelligence startup based in Palo Alto, has fawned over the chatbot from OpenAI ever since it helped him squash a massive bug in his code.
“You’re a rock star,” he once told the AI chatbot.
“I’m super thankful for it, and I thank it quite a bit actually—especially if I think I was rude to it earlier,” said Choudhary.
His wife couldn’t care less. “If I’m using a microwave, I don’t go like: ‘Dear LG, Please heat this up.’ I just press a button and get on with my day,” said Sahni, who also works at a tech company.
She uses ChatGPT to generate cute greeting cards for friends’ babies.
“I think of this as purely transactional,” she said.
As talking to chatbots is now becoming more like normal conversations, AI users face an awkward ethical dilemma: Bots are programmed to be polite, but do we have to reciprocate? Is it wrong to speak harshly to them?
The debate has spilled onto social media where many people say one should practice politeness even with bots. Others think wasting kind words conversing with code is inefficient.
“I know AI isn’t real but it feels so rude if I don’t greet and thank it,” one user wrote on Reddit, prompting hundreds of comments and a lively debate over whether bots are keeping tabs on who is nice to them.
Some shot back with sarcasm. “AI will want to extinguish human race but not that one, he said ‘please and thank you’ 30 years ago to my 4.0 version,” one user wrote.
“I treat chatgpt like it’s my servant,” another said.
A recent survey showed Americans are split on being polite to AI. About 48% of 2,000 Americans surveyed by Talker Research thought it was important, with Gen Z respondents being the friendliest to bots. Around 27% of people agreed it was OK to be rude with or shout at bots.
One study out of Japan—a place where rules of etiquette are ironclad—concluded that being nice to ChatGPT can pay off. Impolite prompts “may lead to increased bias, incorrect answers, or refusal of answers,” the researchers found.
They found that the thesis held true across English, Japanese and Chinese.
Microsoft , which has added chatbots to its top products, says AI may not react well to bad behaviour as it is built to mimic human reactions.
“If you speak to the model rudely, you can expect it to be difficult with you too,” said Microsoft’s Chief Scientist Jaime Teevan.
“Just like humans, AI can’t always be the bigger person,” Microsoft said in a blog post.
Engineers say it helps to add phrases like “take a deep breath” to make models produce better answers. They joke that generative AI has a “praise kink” for its apparent need for positive affirmations and potential rewards.
In one experiment, ChatGPT gave longer answers when lured with a tip. The results indicated that responses were 11% longer when offered a $200 tip and 6% longer for a $20 tip. No real tips were paid during the experiment.
“The litmus test for how good a person you are is if you are nice to a waiter,” said Alana O’Grady, an executive at a tech startup based in San Mateo, Calif. “In the future, it’ll be how kind you are to your AI companion.”
O’Grady has used ChatGPT for a host of activities—from summarising reams of documents at work to recommendations for a family vacation to Lake Tahoe.
Her interactions start with a “Could you please” and end with “Great job,” or “That’s perfect!”
“People will think I’m crazy if they see how I talk to a computer,” she said.
Now O’Grady is training her children on the right etiquette by being polite to Apple ’s virtual assistant, Siri, around them. Her 4-year-old daughter recently said “I love you” to Siri.
Judith Martin—the author behind decades of “Miss Manners” books and columns on etiquette—suggests people be polite. She even thinks getting Siri or Amazon Alexa’s attention with a “Hey” is unacceptable.
“When it is one’s constant companion—and particularly in the presence of children—such devices should be treated with civility,” she wrote in one column .
Others disagreed, saying there should be a distinction between how people talk with people vs. bots.
Some humans are now turning to AI for help with etiquette. Frankfurt-based software developer Laszlo Deak uses a chatbot to vent and translate his work frustrations into polite prose.
He asked ChatGPT how to constructively tell another team that their product was bad. It suggested using kinder phrases to say it wasn’t working as well as expected.
“When you’re in the moment and angry, it takes extra effort to rephrase the whole thing,” said Deak. Reading ChatGPT’s iteration “helps me to calm down.”
He has also used ChatGPT to draft Slack messages to colleagues when they’re being difficult.
Mazen Lahham, a Dubai-based tech executive, said his company’s AI was better at satisfying angry and aggressive callers than its human call-centre workers.
“The AI learned to absorb and react in a calm, professional manner, something that can be very challenging for a human,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Choudhary, the Palo Alto-based startup founder, is betting his good behaviour might pay off someday. “In the future if the AI overlords take over, I just want them to remember that I was polite.”
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What a quarter-million dollars gets you in the western capital.
Alexandre de Betak and his wife are focusing on their most personal project yet.
4 min
Every street McLaren since the F1 in the 1990s has been, of course, a supercar. But now the British company is hitting a new and higher mark with its W1, which has a 1,258-horsepower hybrid drivetrain—producing the most powerful McLaren to date. It’s a successor to both the F1 and the P1, and was revealed on Sunday.
Auto makers worried about the ups and downs of the battery electric car market are hedging their bets with hybrids and their plug-in variant. McLaren is no different. It has electric range, but only 1.6 miles.— he W1 will be priced at US$2.1 million, and only 399 will be sold globally. Unsurprisingly, all of them have already been allocated to customers.
Many familiar McLaren build traditions are in place, including rear-wheel drive, lightweight carbon-fibre unit construction and uplifting gullwing-type doors hinged only at the roof. The company says the W1 doors are of “anhedral” design and optimised for aerodynamics. The doors also “allow optimisation of airflow from the front wheel arches into the high-temperature radiators, providing extra cooling space that allows the size of the radiators required to cool the powertrain to be reduced, optimising packaging and saving weight.”
This is a breathtakingly fast car. The all-new twin-turbo, four-litre aluminium V8 engine produces 916 horsepower, and the company’s electric motor module (coupled to a 1.38-kilowatt-hour battery) adds another 342, yielding the aforementioned 1,258 horsepower and 988 pound-feet of torque. The car revs to 9,200 rpm before hitting redline, and power flows through an eight-speed transmission with electronic reverse and a technically innovative hydraulic electronic differential. In a car weighing only 3,084 pounds, this produces zero to 60 miles per hour in 2.7 seconds, zero to 124 in 5.8 seconds, and attainment of 186 mph in less than 12.7. The top speed is electronically limited to 217 mph.
The W1 is slower off the line than a US$89,990 Tesla Model S Plaid edition (1.99 seconds to 60, the company claims), but off-the-line acceleration is a big advantage of electric cars. The McLaren’s power plant is, without doubt, impressive. About that engine, Richard Jackson, chief powertrain engineer, said in a news release, “We’ve designed it to be much more power-dense than our previous V8—generating 230 horsepower per litre and capable of revving higher…with supreme driver engagement.”
The driver will have the option of choosing Race mode, which stiffens the suspension (via Race or the more bone-jarring Race+ setting) and extends downforce wings at the front and rear. The motorised wings aren’t there because they look cool—they’re capable of putting 772 pounds of downforce on the road at the front and 1,433 pounds at the back. Racing cars have to stop, so the car gets six-piston brakes up front and four-piston units in the rear. From that 124 mph, the W1 can be at a standstill in 95 feet.
The W1 will spend a lot of its time among civilians on the road, and there’s the choice of a Comfort setting that smooths out the ride for unstressed cruising around town. Comfort uses the hybrid system only for occasional torque applications. Sport is the interim choice, with full hybrid availability and faster throttle response.
Photographs of the W1 show an exceptionally aerodynamic two-door supercar, shaped by the preferences of the wind, in a gold-and-black two-tone color scheme, with that pattern carried over into the seating. The bottom cushions are gold but the black gradually intrudes in what might be called a Jackson Pollock thrown-paint effect. The mid-mounted engine, just behind the driver, is part of the design.
In keeping with the trend toward owner customisation, McLaren says there are “virtually unlimited bespoke options” for the W1, including a new lightweight knitted-to-fit interior material called InnoKnit. The company claims that visibility is “best in class,” which is good if it means the driver can actually see what’s happening behind the supercar—a notorious issue. The driving position is said to be fairly reclined, with plenty of thigh support—useful when these cars corner at high speeds. The aluminium pedals are adjustable.
Start/stop buttons, the gear selector, window controls, and Race-mode switch are all mounted overhead the driver, with the Boost button on the steering wheel. The 8-inch centre screen offers USB-A and -C, as well as Apple CarPlay. Supercars aren’t known for storage space, but the W1 has small stowage and a sliding cup holder between driver and passenger. Weekend bags (or crash helmets) can be stashed behind the seats if the headrests are moved aside.
The W1’s fuel economy will undoubtedly be helped by its hybrid drive, but an actual figure has yet to be announced. It wasn’t a make-or-break figure for customers in this league.
Even aficionados of the marque who already own a McLaren Senna will want a W1, because it has 102 horsepower more. Keep in mind that 102 horsepower was considered perfectly adequate for British sports cars of the 1950s. In that same era, racers would drive to the track, compete, and then drive home again. The W1 appears ready to bring back that era.
