alt Hacker Newswhy so many people add 'please' when asking machine to do something? Was there actually research that when you SCREAM or curse it follows your instructions better?
P.S. Although my wife insists that I should stay polite in case AI overlords remember how I treat them ...
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Not to go all ying/yang about it, but just to give a parallel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war - you kinda need silence to draw a contrast with what's meant to be loud.
Separately, my boss confided in us that he's super abusive with his agent, wondering if we are too (no, lol). While I try not to read too much into this (which he doesn't make easy), I also can't help but not really notice a whole lot of amazing agentic delivery differences from his side. On the contrary, while the passion may improve his agent's performance, I'm not sure if it doesn't decrease his, upending the entire theatre.
Probably because polite people are already in the habit of saying please when typing out requests in chat. We're not consciously thinking about it, regardless of whether a human or machine is on the other side.