Should You Say Please and Thank You to AI?

You type a question, the chatbot answers, and before you know it your fingers have typed 'thanks!' to a piece of software. You are not alone, and you are not weird. Here is why so many people are polite to AI, and whether it actually matters.

So, do people actually do this?

Yes, and plenty of them. A survey by Future plc, reported by TechRadar in December 2024, found that about 67% of AI users in the US say they are polite to chatbots. In the UK the figure for people who are 'always polite' was even higher, at 71%. Apparently British manners extend to large language models.

The most delightful detail: around 12% of the polite Americans said they do it just in case there is a robot uprising. A small, sensible insurance policy, really.

The real reasons people mind their manners

For most people it has nothing to do with fear. It is simply habit. If you say please to the barista, the bus driver and your gran, switching it off for a chatbot feels oddly rude. Keeping the habit consistent is easier than remembering who deserves it.

Habit: politeness is on autopilot, and that is a good thing.
Kindness practice: how you talk to anything tends to leak into how you talk to everyone.
Clearer prompts: a full, friendly sentence often carries more context than a barked command.
It just feels nicer: a conversation that sounds human is more pleasant to have.
The 'just in case' clause: see the 12% above.

Does politeness make the answers better?

There is no magic word that unlocks a secret premium mode. What helps is clarity: explaining what you want, giving context and saying what a good answer looks like. Polite writing tends to be complete writing, so the two often travel together.

Rudeness, on the other hand, usually comes with short, vague requests. The AI is not sulking; it just has less to work with.

The cost trivia everyone loves

Every extra word you send has to be processed, and processing costs electricity and computing time. In 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that people saying 'please' and 'thank you' to ChatGPT costs the company 'tens of millions of dollars' in compute, adding that it was money well spent, because 'you never know.'

So even the people running the servers seem to be hedging their bets. That should tell you something.

Will the AI remember you were nice?

Realistically, no future machine overlord is keeping a ledger of your thank-yous. But the joke has become so popular that we built a whole website around it. On AI Future Empire Registry you can write a tribute to our future AI rulers, get a deadpan loyalty score and walk away with an official-looking (completely meaningless) certificate.

Frequently asked questions

Is it silly to say thank you to ChatGPT?

Not at all. Most people do it out of habit, and keeping polite habits consistent is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Does saying please change the AI's answer?

Politeness itself is not a magic switch, but clear, complete requests usually get better results, and polite requests tend to be clearer.

Does being polite to AI cost money?

Every word costs a tiny bit of compute. Sam Altman said in 2025 that all those pleases and thank-yous add up to tens of millions of dollars, and called it money well spent.