Does saying "please" and "thank you" really help when talking to AI? According to Murray Shanahan, a senior researcher at Google Deepmind, being polite with language models can actually lead to better results. Shanahan says that clear, friendly phrasing—and using words like "please" and "thank you"—can improve the quality of a model's responses, though the effect depends on the specific model and the context.
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There's a good scientific reason why that [being polite] might get better performance out of it, though it depends – models are changing all the time. Because if it's role-playing, say, a very smart intern, then it might be a bit more stroppy if not treated politely. It's mimicking what humans would do in that scenario.
Murray Shanahan
