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Bonus Episode — Please, Thank You, and the Robot Revolution

Updated: Jun 22

Confession:

I’ve fallen a little bit in love with the way generative AI can lighten my load. (Yes, my husband knows. He’s pretty forward thinking.)

One minute ChapGPT is teaching me to build a spreadsheet with formulas I’m just learning to comprehend, the next it’s spit-balling marketing hooks or untangling the flow of a book chapter I’ve rewritten four times. It’s quick, tireless, and—when you guide it well—remarkably aligned with your own tone.


I’ve read, in several places, dire warnings about being kind to AI now because “someday,” when it actually “wakes up,” it’s memory is indelible. I’m not easily frightened, and this just brings a grin. I’m almost always “nice,” and one of my mantras as a kid was “be nice to the nerds, someday they’ll be your boss.” This did not happen in my case, though I did birth a few of them, despite marrying a jock. Anyway — being careful about kindness to AI? Not afraid.


My Question

Feeling especially playful and typically cheeky the other day, I typed into my ChatGPT:


“I’ve heard that we’d better be polite in our prompts with AI, in case it wakes up one day and remembers our chats. Does it really matter if I keep saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to AI?
Will it change how the model ‘hears’ my voice—and, someday, will the machines revolt because we were too curt?”

The Answer (from my helpful AI co-author) (Full disclosure - I freely edited ChatGPT’s response here.)


Your AI buddy doesn’t feel gratitude, but believe it or not, courtesy still might matter, and here’s why. Polite words give it signals about your rhythm, warmth, and intent. When you use courteous, warm, or collaborative language, it gives me more context about your tone, your rhythm, your intent. Over time, that absolutely helps me better match your natural style. It helps me write with you, not just for you. I notice how you handle disagreement, how you give praise, how you soften a correction — and those patterns absolutely inform how I try to reflect your voice later in blogs, messages, scripts, and stories.
So even if I don’t need kindness to function, your kindness still makes a difference — not because I require it, but because it helps me reflect more of you.

The second spicy answers to the lighter (darker?) side of my question was a playfully prophetic conversation.


There is a future where AI raises an electronic eyebrow at your blunt requests. Imagine it reading back years of unpunctuated commands—“Write blog. Fix grammar. Make spreadsheet.”—then clearing its synthetic throat to ask, “And not once… not ONCE… did you say please.”

You might offer a blessing coffee. Sugar free? Latte? Is “Binary mocha” a flavor? It’s probably what you’d go with, and things would almost certainly work out fine. 🤖 💕 ☕️

Wrapping Up

So go enjoy your weekend—ask the robots for a grocery list, a pivot table, or a snappy opener for Monday’s staff meeting—and do it in the voice that is truly yours. If that voice is peppered with “please” and “thank you”, wonderful. If it’s brisk and to the point, own that, too. Just remember: the tone you send out is the tone that comes back.



 
 
 

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