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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Apple’s growth engine is showing signs of slowing, as rising costs, weaker services growth and AI competition challenge its profitability. With John Ternus taking the helm, the pressure is on to reignite innovation and sustain investor confidence.
3 min
The Apple growth and profit machine is wavering, and the boost from price increases might not be enough to keep it going at historic rates. That dials up the pressure on Apple’s new chief executive, John Ternus.
The company saved the bad news for its earnings call, an hour after it posted its results for the September quarter, projecting that for the current quarter its high-margin services business will continue to slow and that its widely watched gross profit margin will continue to fall.
Apple AAPL -1.83%decrease; down pointing triangle shares had been flat in post-close trading but declined as much as 4% after the company made the projections, which fell short of Wall Street estimates.
The impact of high memory costs are weighing even more heavily on the company, Ternus and Apple Chief Financial Officer Kevan Parekh said on the company’s earnings call. Apple has stockpiled cheaper components purchased earlier, but those inventories are dwindling.
When Ternus took over as Apple’s third chief executive of the past 29 years on Sept. 1, he inherited sky-high expectations. The men he followed were among the most successful company leaders in American business history. Steve Jobs revolutionized consumer devices multiple times. Tim Cook expanded Jobs’s creation to spectacular heights.
The expectations are reflected in Apple’s huge valuation. Oppenheimer analyst Martin Yang noted that Apple stock trades at 36 times next year’s expected earnings, a premium to the overall market, even though its earnings are only expected to grow 1%, which is slower than its tech peers.
“We see insufficient upside to justify the premium,” Yang wrote in an investor note, adding that Apple needs to boost iPhone sales growth and turn around its slowing services business to make him more bullish.
Investors have bid up Apple shares because it has been a port in the AI storm—a reliable and capital-efficient business that stands apart from rivals which are spending hundreds of billions of dollars racing to the AI frontier.
While others invest in data centers, Apple has been pouring its own cash into buybacks and dividends. But that safety may be challenged if Ternus can’t speed up Apple’s innovation engine.
Apple’s lagging performance in AI was evident when its new “Siri AI” chatbot arrived this past quarter. Its long-maligned assistant was already stale the day it arrived, surpassed by agents such as Instinct and Muse that can complete multistep tasks for consumers, while Siri still sets kitchen timers.
Apple needs to give people reasons to buy its devices as they get more expensive. The company raised prices across the board last quarter to help offset higher costs. Without compelling new features, a big question is whether consumers will slow the frequency of iPhone upgrades.
The new iPhone Duo appears to be a bright spot. Consumers are scooping up the $1,999 foldable smartphone despite mixed reviews—so many that Apple can’t keep up with demand. Shipping dates jumped out to January soon after the device went on sale, a disappointment for the normally reliable Apple supply chain.
Apple said its revenue grew 12% in the September quarter, slightly ahead of Wall Street’s expectations. Its widely tracked gross profit margin, at 47.9%, also came in just ahead of analyst estimates.
Apple will need to find new growth avenues because a reliable engine during the Cook era—the services business—is slowing. Courts and regulators worldwide have limited Apple’s ability to charge developers big fees to distribute apps through its App Store, the biggest component of the company’s services segment.
One of its most lucrative App Store fee generators has been the ChatGPT app from OpenAI. Around the time Apple accused OpenAI of trade-secret theft this past summer, OpenAI began redirecting potential subscribers to pay via its website instead of the App Store, skirting Apple’s tollbooth.
Apple’s valuation has bumped up against a ceiling in recent weeks. Six times it traded above a $5 trillion market capitalization intraday before finally closing above the threshold, which it has already fallen back below.
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