A couple months ago, Sam Altman, founder and CEO Open AI, was asked if it was OK to say “please” and “thank you” to his explosively successful chatbot.
He replied yes. It costs his company tens of millions of dollars when you type in those words, he acknowledged—but it is money “well spent.”
Altman is admired and feared (take your pick) for revolutionizing the information ecosystem, but his comment embodies a message of humanity. It underscores the importance for managers, and those they manage, of maintaining civility and respect.
It helps to remember that as you use AI tools like ChatGPT, the tool gets to know you and responds accordingly. The more we understand AI, the better we’ll be at using it to communicate. As AI takes over tasks like analyzing documents and answering emails, managers can be more efficient—but they should not forget to say please and thank you.
In his TED talk,
Altman explains why we are starting to humanize our interactions with tools like ChatGPT. The new large language models (LLMs) are so good at writing answers, he said, “there’s really no way to know if it is thinking that, or it just saw that a lot of times in the training set…. And of course, like — if you can’t tell the difference, how much do you care?”
That said, the fear of AI potentially replacing humans in work, study, travel and all sorts of activities is increasingly pervasive. Who is not anxious that we risk losing sight of the imperfections and inefficiencies of human interaction?
Altman seems to understand that anxiety. If AI is “doing everything I do — what’s going to happen to me?” he says. But his attitude is: “Okay, now there’s this new tool. I can do a lot more — what am I going to be able to do?”
As for being nice to your Chatbot, Meghan O’Rourke, a poet and professor at Yale, says the more her chatbot got to know her, the more useful it became. Another writer, Eben Shapiro, asked recently in the Wall Street Journal: “Is it bad that I desperately need my chatbot’s approval?”.
But as Altman said in that TED talk, his own children will “never grow up in a world where computers don’t just kind of understand you.”
We can all start by being civil to colleagues and employees and even (or especially) to our computers.