A simple question posed on X (formerly Twitter) has sparked a curious debate about digital etiquette — and its potential cost. One user asked, “I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman chimed in with a characteristically dry reply: “Tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know.”
While Altman’s response was clearly tongue-in-cheek, it opened up a broader conversation: does politeness to artificial intelligence come with a price tag?
Technology site Futurism picked up the exchange, musing on whether pleasantries like “please” and “thank you” — often directed at ChatGPT and other AI tools — might be not only unnecessary but also wasteful in terms of time and computing power.
But not everyone sees it as a pointless gesture. Kurt Beavers, a design director on the Microsoft Copilot team, suggested there’s more to digital politeness than meets the eye. According to Beavers, polite inputs from users can influence tone and outcomes. “Using polite language sets a tone for the response,” he said. “When an AI model clocks politeness, it’s more likely to be polite back.”
In other words, AI might be mirroring more than just words — it could be taking cues from human manners, too.
Still, while some users embrace courteous phrasing as part of interacting with AI in a more “human” way, others argue it’s just another habit formed in a world of voice assistants and automated replies — or perhaps even a subconscious hedge against a sci-fi-style future where machines remember how we treated them.
