- Only around 70% of people are polite to AI when interacting with it
- Roughly two thirds of impolite AI users say it’s for brevity
- 12% of respondents are polite in case there’s a robot uprising
Are you polite when talking to AI? And if you are, is it because it’s the right thing to do or because you’re afraid being rude will have consequences after the robot uprising?
For some 12% of respondents to a new survey, it really is the case that they’re polite to AI because they fear the future consequences. That’s according to in-depth research conducted in December 2024 by Future, the publisher which owns TechRadar.
The survey of more than 1,000 people found that while roughly 1 in 2 people use AI (51% of surveyed people in the US, and 45% in the UK), not everyone is kind to chatbots such as ChatGPT and their smart speakers. In the US, only 67% of people who use AI are polite to it, while in the UK only 71% are polite.
More AI survey results
While this is the majority of people, and an increase of 3% and 11% respectively in each region compared to a previous running of the survey three months prior, the data shows that blunt and quick demands are the big reason why people forget to say please and thank you.
We’re being kinder to AI
Diving into the US stats specifically, of the 67% of people surveyed who said they’re always polite to AI, 82% answered that they did so simply because it’s “nice” to say “please” and “thank you” – regardless of whether you’re speaking to an AI or human. The remaining 18% of this group said that they’re polite in case there’s ever an AI uprising – banking on their previous politeness as a means of survival.
Of the 33% of participants who use AI and aren’t polite, meanwhile, two-fifths said they don’t see the point in being polite, while the rest are merely keeping their AI requests brief and to the point.
People in the UK are apparently a little more polite to AI than users in the US, with 71% of Brits surveyed saying if they interacted with AI they were always polite (an increase of 11% compared to the previous survey).
Of that 71%, 83% of polite users (or 59% of all AI users surveyed in the UK) said they always remembered to say please and thank you to AI because it’s the right thing to do, while, 17% were worried about a robot uprising.
Not everyone in the UK is polite, of course, and of the 29% of AI users who admitted they didn’t bother with niceties, about a third said it was because they didn’t see the point, while the remaining two-thirds wanted to keep their AI requests short and sweet.
Analysis: Be nice to our AI overlords
While the majority of respondents tend to be polite to AI, expert opinion is divided as to whether it’s necessary or not.
“It is encouraging to see that users feel that being polite to AI-powered assistants is the right thing to do,” says Ben Wood, Chief Analyst at CCS Insight. “Personally, I think this is important from a societal perspective. If it becomes acceptable to be disrespectful to AI assistants, that behaviour will start to leech into interpersonal interactions, and that’s a slippery slope.
“This is not a new direction, and it’s worth noting that Amazon introduced a ‘politeness feature’ called Magic Word back in 2018, which encouraged children to say “please and thank you” by acknowledging use of the terms.”
That sentiment is mirrored by A.J. Ghergich, a global VP at Botify, who states that “When we say ‘please’ to ChatGPT, we’re not irrational – we’re irrepressibly human. The CASA (Computers Are Social Actors) paradigm reveals that our social instincts don’t distinguish between flesh-and-blood and code.”
John-Anthony Disotto, TechRadar’s Senior AI Writer, has a slightly different take, though: “I’m actually surprised that 70% of people are polite to AI, after all it’s just a computer program, right?
“There’s definitely an element of the unknown that plays into the way we interact with AI, and I think a lot of people are subconsciously scared of what the future holds. Opting for politeness as a way to keep AI on side is fear mongering at its finest, but we’ve all seen 2001: A Space Odyssey…”
Then again, it seems there is another reason to be polite to an AI – it can improve the results. As Ghergich says, “It turns out being polite to your AI isn’t just being nice for nothing – it’s a clever tactic.
“Studies show that when we’re polite, we trigger patterns in the AI that connect to helpful, detailed human communication. Polite prompts can improve AI performance by up to 30%.”
Whatever your reason for being polite to AI, it does line up with increasing efforts by AI providers to make their chatbots seem more human-like – perhaps explaining why we’re talking to the robots more kindly.
And if you aren’t polite to AI? Well, you’d better hope that robot uprising doesn’t take place any time soon.
510 participants from the US and 518 participants from the UK responded to the survey.
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hamish.hector@futurenet.com (Hamish Hector)
