OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has revealed that merely being polite to ChatGPT might be costing “tens of millions of dollars” in extra computing resources.
When asked much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying “please” and “thank you” to their AI models, Altman responded: “tens of millions of dollars well spent. You never know.”
tens of millions of dollars well spent–you never know
— Sam Altman (@sama) April 16, 2025
Every word sent to ChatGPT – even common courtesies – requires additional processing power. Even seemingly small interactions add up quickly across billions of conversations, driving up both electricity costs and server usage
AI models rely heavily on colossal data centers that already account for about 2% of global electricity consumption, and this is expected to climb, with AI potentially draining the same quantity of energy as an industrialized country such as Japan.
According to a Washington Post investigation conducted in collaboration with University of California researchers, generating a single 100-word email using AI requires 0.14 kilowatt-hours of electricity – enough to power 14 LED lights for an hour. At scale, these small interactions create a massive energy footprint.
The water usage is equally striking. UC Riverside researchers found that using GPT-4 to generate 100 words consumes up to three bottles of water for cooling the servers, and even a simple three-word response like “You are welcome” uses about 1.5 ounces of water.
Why are users being polite to machines?
Evidence suggests people are genuinely attempting to practice sound AI etiquette. A late 2023 survey found that 67% of US respondents reported being nice to their chatbots.
Of those practising digital politeness, 55% said they do it “because it’s the right thing to do,” while a more cautious 12% admitted doing it to “appease the algorithm in the case of an AI uprising.” AI has come a long way since 2023, and we’ve seen plenty of doomsday theories make headlines, so that figure might be much higher now!
Rather than AI etiquette being purely a psychological or behavioral matter, a study by researchers at Waseda University found that using polite prompts can actually produce higher-quality responses from large language models (LLMs).
LLMs are trained on human interactions, after all; “LLMs reflect the human desire to be respected to a certain extent,” the researchers explain.
The human element
Beyond technical performance, some experts argue there’s value in maintaining politeness toward AI for our own sake. Using disrespectful language with AI might normalize rudeness in our human interactions.
This phenomenon has already been observed with earlier voice assistants. Some parents have reported their children becoming less respectful after growing accustomed to barking commands at Siri or Alexa, leading Google to introduce their “Pretty Please” feature to encourage politeness among children back in 2018.
So, whether you’re nice to your AI for performance reasons, etiquette best practice, or to stay on the right side of AI in case of a Matrix-esque takeover, just be aware that every interaction comes with a cost.
