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Should we be polite to ChatGPT?

Authors

Xinyang Ding

Rubric:Philosophy
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Quote
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Annotation

This paper explores the topic of politeness and whether or not it's necessary when interacting with non-humans, like AI chatbots. Through related scholarly research, the findings of this paper conclude that since AI lacks consciousness, clear, specific prompts are more important to improve AI responses than politeness. Additionally, from a utilitarian perspective, adding polite phrases wastes financial resources and energy, and generates carbon emissions while not producing consistently higher quality output. In sum, the most rational approach is to treat AI chatbots as powerful computational tools.

Keywords

consciousness
AI
politeness
computational tools
ChatGPT

Authors

Xinyang Ding

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