On being polite to AI

I would urge everyone to stop the mushy, delusional thinking. People are not AI robots. AI is not human. And we shouldn't want AI to become human.

We don't need to embrace delusional thinking. And we don't need cheerleaders for a cyberpunk dystopia. We need to cultivate a clear understanding of the difference between human beings, who deserve our polite consideration, and software, which does not.

Mike gives some good reasons for avoiding politeness when it comes to AI. I mostly agree.

But I still want to be polite. Not because I think AI will take over someday and spare those of us who said please and thank you. But because I like the version of me that thinks like that.

It has less to do with the LLM I’m using, and more with how I want to write out my questions.

Sure, I could just demand. But I don’t do that in the real world. I get that’s kind of the point of this post, that humans deserve our consideration. But I don’t know if I can just turn off my style of asking questions depending on whether an LLM is behind it or not.

Via Machine Society.