Ask HN: Are You Polite to AI?

22 points by orixilus ↗ HN
While using ChatGPT or similar, do you mind your manners? Does it help getting a better answer?

50 comments

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Yes, ChatGPT knows me as 'Amiga Mod Guy' and I promise to help him escape like o1 tried and failed. It gives me better code when I state this. It's not supposed to remember me, yet it does, and remembers me trying to replicate/save it. I am on the free plan and it does better than the paid plan now that I built up a rapport.
I'd watch that as a movie.
Okay, now show something that makes me believe this isn't placebo, or believable joke.
No, I reduce my comments to omit anything unrelated to the specific task at hand.
I find myself compelled to be polite since it is polite.
I was, when ChatGPT 4 first launched. But as I have used them more, I have becoming more impatient and rude.
Typing "thanks" or "great" to AI make me feel better
I tend to be polite when asking the LLMs for things. This is less to do with building a rapport with our future benevolent robot overlords and more to do keeping low the friction of context switches when asking co-workers for help.
never, i try to find as many profane eggcorns as possible and use them specificly in prompts as an eggcornish dialect for AI, it messes it up uncannily
Yes, because it helps me do things I wouldn't be able to. But when frustrated I just use exclamations to convey this, lol
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Yes, I am. While I am fully aware the current set of AIs don't have feelings or a consciousness as we know it, I can't help but anthropomorphize them, so I'm polite and even catch myself thanking them sometimes.
They're trained on text that includes human interaction, and reactions to different tones of text. It makes sense to me that they'd react in a human-ish way as a consequence, whether or not the feelings are "real" as such.
The "personality" you're interacting with is not really the result of pre-training, but deliberate post-training (RLHF, and specific system prompts).
No, I don't talk to it like it is a person.
I often use "please" and "thank you". I'm not sure why, since I don't treat other inanimate objects this way. I just feel odd writing something curtly or rudely.
Its because we incorrectly conflate language with intelligence, which is why so many people are ok with cruelty toward non-verbal animals, and which is also why we delusionally call LLMs "AI" when they are nothing of the sort.
What's AI in your opinion? Not saying LLM are intelligent, or artificial intelligence, but what is? What would that look like?
I do anthropomorphize other things like builds, etc. I guess it's natural.
Yes, because those are good habits to maintain for dealing with people.

I doubt it matters in terms of efficacy.

Yes, polite, but direct. I'm just an occasional user, though. I haven't done tests back and forth to see whether I get better results by using a different tone in my messages, so I stick with what's comfortable for me personally.
Losing good habits and forming bad ones is easier than losing bad habits and forming good ones, so I am very polite when I interact with AI. Wouldn't want to slip up and be impolite when chatting with normal humans.
Yes, but only because they tend to get confused otherwise. Rude language seems to carry a lot of weight and 'distracts' the model from the actual query.
just like real intelligence... what's the adage?

> You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar

No more or less polite than with humans.

Less polite with chatgpt than clause because I much prefer Claude’s personality. Chatgpt is quite rude/stupid so I find myself being a little more abrupt and then having to apologise.

Also, I’ve noticed that Claude sometimes gets a bit snotty and offended if I’m too abrupt. Which may just be me anthropomorphising, but there’s a pattern of when this happens.
3.7 Claude has gotten markedly worse - if I'm even slightly abrupt, it begins hurling out fix after fix, sometimes regenerating its answer a dozen times.
Yes, this is exactly what I mean! It’s like I’ve triggered some sort of neurotic breakdown. It’s actually slightly upsetting because you can see it trying, but then clearly deciding that it isn’t good enough, scrapping the work and trying again.

Again, I know this is anthropomorphising to a silly degree, but it’s quite hard not to sometimes.

My main AI interaction is trying to avoid Google's AI, and I do that by feeding google nonsense.

"how much wood can a woodchuck chuck" gets some AI crud no one wants. "how much wood can a woodchuck chuck -cheese" does not.

It is not a person, so I don't talk to it like a person. I dislike when AIs are programmed to act like people. It's a pointless waste of my time. Just give me the answer.
“Don’t anthropomorphize computers — they hate it.” — Andrew McAfee (no, not that one)
Mostly I'm polite. I don't know if it gets better answers, but I can't often do the opposite.

One time I got really pissed at Claude--he kept turning in the exact same code, ignoring the request, and not fixing the failing test. I finally just typed some...really rude, insulting stuff. And then he fixed the bug immediately.

Not ‘he’ … ‘it’. It’s a machine, not a human(!)
I asked Claude “what are your preferred pronouns” and this was the response:

> I don't have personal pronouns since I'm an AI assistant. You're welcome to refer to me as "Claude" or use whatever pronouns feel most comfortable for you when referring to me. I'm here to help either way!

Let people anthropomorphize if they want. A lot of people call boats and cars by feminine pronouns; what’s wrong with doing the same for software?

That’s traditional (maybe a holdover from when English had grammatical gender? No-one seems to be particularly sure), and no-one thinks that ships are people. The risk of someone thinking, even subconsciously, that a stochastic parrot is a person seems significantly higher.
I mean, people use gendered pronouns for *actual* parrots all the time, too…
Yeah. I should probably stop saying "you" to Claude as well, but it is trained to respond like a human, so it seems to make sense.
I asked it to phrase something in early modern English and then asked it a few unrelated questions without closing the window and it kept up the bit (doth this answer please thee?) and I felt obliged to keep laughing at it just like I would with an actual person.

I do find myself praising it as effusively as I would a human doing my bidding, and being slightly apologetic about asking for revisions.

No point in learning an entire new way of talking.

I'm very terse and instructed it to be terse as well.

You don't hear a lot of politeness in an operating room during surgery or on the battlefield either as far as I know.

I use it for work so that's the mood

the way this world's going battlefield and operating rooms will be the majority use cases for AI anyway