Should We Be Polite to ChatGPT? Manners and Machines

I sat across from my roommate last Tuesday night watching her type "Please help me understand this calculus problem" into ChatGPT, then add "thank you so much" after the explanation appeared. When I asked why she bothered being nice to software, she looked genuinely uncomfortable and said it felt wrong not to. I had been firing commands at AI assistants for months without a second thought, treating them like search engines with better grammar. Her discomfort made me reconsider. While artificial intelligence systems cannot feel hurt or appreciated, the way we speak to them shapes our habits of communication and reflects the kind of people we choose to become.

Our politeness to machines matters not for their sake but for ours.

The question of etiquette toward AI has followed me since childhood, when my parents insisted I say please to Alexa despite my protests that she was just a speaker. They argued that rude commands would make me rude to people, a connection I dismissed as old-fashioned until I started noticing my own tone shifting. ChatGPT and similar systems arrived at college with me, becoming daily tools for research, writing help, and problem-solving. Unlike Alexa's simple responses, these programs produce paragraphs that sound thoughtful and human, which makes the interaction feel different. I have caught myself using a harsher tone with the AI than I would with a tutor, interrupting its responses and demanding rewrites without acknowledgment. This semester I decided to examine whether that distinction actually serves me.

Politeness to AI functions as practice for human interaction, a rehearsal that builds or erodes our capacity for respect. Last month I spent six hours straight using ChatGPT to prepare for midterms, growing increasingly frustrated as I refined prompts and rejected outputs. By the time my study partner arrived, I barked "Just show me your notes" at her before realizing how I sounded. The transition from machine to person had not reset my tone. Neuroscience research on habit formation suggests that repeated behaviors create neural pathways that activate automatically, meaning the courtesy or curtness we practice anywhere becomes our default mode. When I type brusque commands for hours, that impatience does not stay contained in the chat window. It seeps into my emails to professors, my texts to friends, and my requests to dining hall workers. Treating AI politely keeps those pathways aligned with the person I want to be in all contexts.

The content of our requests to AI also reveals and reinforces our values in ways that matter beyond the immediate task. In my environmental studies class, our professor asked us to use ChatGPT to generate arguments, then analyze what we had requested. I had asked for "the strongest case against carbon taxes" without specifying that I wanted honest objections rather than strawman arguments. The resulting text was technically what I requested but intellectually lazy, and I realized I had not brought to the AI the same critical thinking I would bring to a library. My classmate Maya, who always frames her prompts as collaborative questions, got more useful results because she had asked the system to consider multiple perspectives and identify weaknesses in each. Her politeness was not just courtesy but intellectual rigor. The way we address AI trains us in how carefully we think, whether we demand quick answers or invite complexity, whether we see tools as servants or as extensions of our own reasoning.

Some argue that distinguishing between human and machine interactions is precisely the skill we need, that reserving politeness for people who can actually be hurt prevents us from wasting emotional energy on objects. My linguistics professor holds this view, pointing out that anthropomorphizing AI makes us vulnerable to manipulation by companies that profit from our attachment to their products. He has a point. There is something troubling about feeling guilty for closing ChatGPT mid-conversation, as if I have abandoned a tutor without explanation. The system does not care, has no experience of interruption, processes my rudeness exactly like my courtesy. Spending mental effort on please and thank you to software could be energy better directed toward actual people, whose feelings exist and matter. Perhaps casual efficiency with machines and careful respect with humans represents mature discernment rather than inconsistency.

Yet I keep returning to the evidence of my own experience, which suggests that the boundary between machine-talk and people-talk is more porous than I want to admit. This morning I found myself saying "Could you help me with something?" to ChatGPT before catching the shift in my own tone, noticing it felt less transactional than my old habit of commands. That small change made me more patient when the first response missed what I needed, more willing to clarify rather than demand. I have started seeing the AI not as a servant to order around or a person to please, but as a tool I use with the same intentionality I bring to any other part of my day. Whether machines deserve our manners is the wrong question. The right one asks who we become through the manners we practice, regardless of the recipient. I do not yet know if courtesy to AI makes me significantly better to people, but I know that contempt anywhere makes me worse everywhere, and that seems reason enough to choose the former.

Did you like this example?

237

10