Mind Your AI Manners

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Artificial Intelligence  

There was a comment made last year by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, that being polite to ChatGPT costs tens of millions of dollars in additional power and processing costs. It got quite a lot of attention. As the research referenced in that link shows, most of us do tend to be polite to the AI tools that we use, and I wonder if that isn’t a good thing.

Okay…so it costs money, and it increases energy consumption, which has a potential impact on the planet.  But let’s be honest: The impact is pretty darn small against the massive overall financial and energy footprint created by all of the various AI platforms. And I genuinely believe that a little bit of politeness goes a long way, even with AI.

I get the argument—it’s just a piece of software, it doesn’t care how we talk to it, or if we include the niceties of human interactions in our dealings with it.

But let’s look at the bigger picture for a moment.

If AI is a team member, treat them that way
Talk around AI is frequently of having it as an additional team member rather than simply an additional application on our computers. That’s especially true now that agentic AI is starting to become real and AI can become accountable for completing work as well as for providing information. The idea of AI team members reflects the fact that it is genuinely different …

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