• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, 2 hours ago

I have a rather strange confession to make.  I say "please" and "thank you" to AI.  I do it just about every time.  Whenever I ask Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT to help me find something, I start my prompts with “could you please,” and end with “thank you, this is great.”  The same goes when I talk to Siri or Alexa.  To me, this is how you engage in conversation, and I was raised to speak that way.  I don’t do it because I think machines have feelings -- I know they don’t.  The interesting thing is not everyone speaks to AI like this, and that bums me out.

A recent survey I saw said that 86% of office workers say please and thank you to their AI tools.  I think that number is too high.  I know plenty of people who are simply rude to these tools.  They bark commands, type in fragments, and when the answer comes back wrong, they let the machine have it. 

Apparently, most people have cursed at a chatbot at least once.  I understand that, having cursed at work sometimes myself, but to what effect with a chatbot AI?

Whose habits are we really training here?

Think about how we’re being asked to use these tools at work.  AI is no longer a search box.  It’s becoming an assistant, a researcher, a junior analyst -- in some cases, something pretty close to an employee.  We delegate work to it and give it feedback.  We ask it to revise and try again.

 If you had a new hire sitting next to you, you’d be kind and courteous, and you’d say thank you when they got it right, because that’s how you build a working relationship where people actually want to help you.

If you spend eight hours a day being curt and abrupt with an assistant that happens to be software, how long before that becomes the way you talk to the assistant who happens to be a real person?  Habits don’t come with a toggle switch, and I’m not convinced most of us can draw the line between how we talk to a machine and how we talk to the people helping us.

When I started in this business, memos were typed up and hand-delivered around the office, and they were formal because you had to think about what you were writing before it landed on someone’s desk.  Email made things more conversational, and text and Slack made things even more casual. Every new channel has shaved a little more formality off the way we communicate. 

I think we need to find our way back to courtesy, in our communications and in our prompts.  Explain what you need and why, say please, and say thank you.  It turns out that’s also a pretty good way to write a prompt, and an even better way to write an email.

It also helps maintain a positive work environment, and in my experience, the teams that are kind to each other tend to be the ones that do the best work.  Courtesy is contagious.  So is rudeness.  We get to choose which one we practice all day, and I’d rather practice the one I want my colleagues to catch.

And to be completely honest, if the machines ever do take over, I’d like to be remembered as one of the polite ones.