Capitalist ghoul spearheading putting chatbots in everything says he's losing millions in dollars because people have manners

If chivalry isn't already dead, it's certainly circling the drain.

morality sophism. Obviously fucking not or else you wouldn't be writing this article.

OpenAI CEO and tech billionaire Sam Altman recently admitted that people politely saying "please" and "thank you" to their AI chatbots is costing him bigtime.

Lmfao

When one poster on X-formerly-Twitter wondered aloud "how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying 'please' and 'thank you' to their models," Altman chimed in, saying it's "tens of millions of dollars well spent."

Imagine finding out that a part of the fact that we're boiling the oceans, destroying ecologies, generally fucking over our fellow man, and so forth, is coming from people having manners when they're texting their chatbot. Incredibly funny that it's needlessly burning that fucker's money and it's passing him off, but also incredibly fucked up.

">You never know," he added.

While it may seem pointless to treat an AI chatbot with respect, some AI architects say it's an important move. Microsoft's design manager Kurtis Beavers, for example, says proper etiquette "helps generate respectful, collaborative outputs."

who gives a shit

"Using polite language sets a tone for the response," Beavers notes. The argument can certainly be made; what we consider "artificial intelligence" might more accurately be described as "prediction machines," like your phone's predictive text, but with more autonomy to spit out complete sentences in response to questions or instructions.

Yeah it's a fucking glorified tickle-me-elmo that boiling tons of precious fresh water to make it work

"When it clocks politeness, it’s more likely to be polite back," a Microsoft WorkLab memo notes. "Generative AI also mirrors the levels of professionalism, clarity, and detail in the prompts you provide."

A late 2024 survey found that 67 percent of US respondents reported being nice to their chatbots. Of those who practice courtesy, 55 percent of American AI users said they do it "because it's the right thing to do," while 12 percent did it to appease the algorithm in the case of an AI uprising.

That 12 percent should be forced to create AI chatbot versions of themselves and be told their digital selves are gonna be tortured for all eternity by a roko basilisk AI program.

That AI revolution is probably a long way off, if it happens at all — many AI researchers doubt we'll ever build a truly "intelligent" algorithm, at least based on the current tech of large language models (LLMs) — but the environmental consequences of present-day AI are all too real. Unfortunately, those "pleases" and "thank yous" are adding up, bigtime.

Yeah it's all a fucking scam, that in one tiny way is biting the capitalist beast in its ass

One Washington Post investigation, done in collaboration with researchers at the University of California, studied the impacts of generating a 100-word email. They found that just one email requires .14 kilowatt-hours worth of electricity, or enough to power 14 LED lights for an hour. If you were to send one AI email a week over the course of a year, you'd use an eye-watering 7.5kWh, roughly equal to an hour's worth of electricity consumed by 9 households in Washington DC.

Here's where we're doing the "boiling the oceans away math"

Now imagine the tens of thousands of lengthy prompts we're feeding chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT on the daily — not exactly low-impact.
While AI etiquette might sound trivial, it all underscores the rather grim reality that our queries have consequences, particularly on the environment. The data centers used to power these chatbots already suck up about 2 percent of the world's energy consumption, a number that's likely to skyrocket as AI floods every corner of daily life.

AND WHO'S FAULT IS IT THAT FUCKING SPEAK-AND-SPELL BOTS ARE IN EVERYTHING NOW? YOURE NOT GONNA SAY ITS OUR FAULT, ARE YOU?

So if you're mulling whether or not to thank Grok for its efforts, maybe the better move would be to ditch the chatbot and write the email yourself. The earth — and your brain — will thank you.

GET BENT GET BENT GET BENT GET BENT GET BENT GET BENT GET BENT GET BENT

16 comments

That 12 percent should be forced to create AI chatbot versions of themselves and be told their digital selves are gonna be tortured for all eternity by a roko basilisk AI program
it’s a joke.
- When there's techbros literally working themselves into a frothy mess over reinventing Pascals wager, it stops being a joke and starts becoming a call to shove them in dumpsters
  
  im just saying nobody knows what roko's basilisk is and that 12% of respondants are making a joke
  
  Concidering how it's more than mainstream enough for dozens of articles to make a kerfuffle over it for more than a decade and even make Elon Musk and Claire Boucher to become partners over meming it in music, I'd beg to differ
  
  Please wont save you from the basilisk though. You have to toil away to create it or else timeless acausal decision hell for a copy of you that you feel you ought to prioritise because ????
  The polite is a joke. Fucking bizarre people don't answer it's about improving response quality. I am a divine being, computers are rocks. I will not thank objects, it is profane.