OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently revealed that people’s polite behavior towards AI chatbots—saying “please” and “thank you”—is costing the company millions of dollars. When one user on X (formerly Twitter) wondered aloud how much money OpenAI loses due to these polite gestures, Altman responded that it amounted to “tens of millions of dollars well spent.”
While the idea of treating an AI chatbot with manners might sound trivial, experts argue that politeness plays a role in shaping AI interactions. Microsoft’s design manager Kurtis Beavers suggests that using respectful language when interacting with AI “helps generate respectful, collaborative outputs.” In essence, polite queries set a tone for the response, potentially fostering more effective and professional conversations.
Generative AI models, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, operate on complex predictive algorithms. These models rely on large amounts of data and electricity to function, with every polite “please” or “thank you” contributing to their energy consumption. Beavers notes that when AI models “clock politeness,” they tend to respond in kind, reflecting the professionalism and clarity of the prompts they receive.
A recent survey from late 2024 found that 67 percent of US AI users reported being polite to their chatbots. Of these, 55 percent claimed it was because “it’s the right thing to do,” while 12 percent did it to “appease the algorithm” in case of an AI uprising.
Despite the humorous notion of AI “rebelling” in the future, the environmental impact of such interactions is very real. A study by the University of California and The Washington Post found that generating a simple 100-word email using AI requires 0.14 kilowatt-hours of electricity—enough to power 14 LED lights for an hour. If someone were to send one AI-generated email each week for an entire year, that would consume 7.5kWh of energy—roughly equivalent to the energy used by nine households in Washington, DC for one hour.
Considering the vast number of prompts and queries processed by AI systems daily, the cumulative energy consumption becomes staggering. Data centers, which power these chatbots, already account for around 2 percent of the world’s total energy usage, and that figure is expected to rise dramatically as AI becomes more embedded in daily life.