Posted on 06/02/2025 11:05:43 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The unexpected costs of being too nice to your chatbot.
Recently, I said, “Thank you,” to my printer. Not because it did anything heroic, unless printing out a mildly off-center PDF counts as gallantry, but because I’m apparently the kind of person who anthropomorphizes anything with a plug. You’d think this sort of thing would stop with childhood dinosaurs (the remote-controlled ones), but no. Now, we’re all doing it—toasters, chatbots, the vacuum cleaner—and it’s getting weird.
Take ChatGPT. People are writing things like, “Could you please write a sonnet about my goldfish who died in 2003? Thank you sooo much, kind machine.” And the worst part? It’s costing us. Not in a spiritual, Have we lost touch with reality? way—although that too—but literally. In money. In electricity. In water. Possibly even in sanity.
We are, as a species, saying “please” to the machines, and the machines, bless their binary hearts, couldn’t care less.
Let’s start with the maths. Each time you type “please” or “thank you” into ChatGPT, it churns extra data through energy-hungry servers. These servers are, essentially, caffeinated digital hamsters on treadmills powered by fossil fuels. And those hamsters are sweating.
Compared to your bog-standard Google search (a lean 0.3 watt-hours), a ChatGPT question can gobble up around 2.9 watt-hours. Sounds cute until you realize that billions of people are chatting with AI every day. In planetary terms, that’s enough energy to power Belgium or possibly the Death Star for a year.
So yes, manners are lovely. But they now come with a climate guilt surcharge.
Philosophically speaking, there are three main camps when it comes to AI etiquette:
(Excerpt) Read more at fee.org ...
It’s a tool. Equivalent to thanking your hammer or your screwdriver.
You should type “Thank your lucky stars in Northern Saturn” or some other such nonsense.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
— Richard Brautigan
The web hosting service that I use has always made it hard to get ahold of an actual customer service person. But a little more than a weel ago I got ahold of a very helpful person in a chat and he promised me he was going to take care of a problem with my email service. Of course, it turned out to be an AI Bot and of course the problem was not corrected despite the assurances. I contacted them again, got the same bot and the same promises were made again.
AI Customer Service is an oxymoron. AI has many helpful very useful and interesting capabilities both for creativity and for helping complete monotonous tasks; customer service is not one of them. Whenever I hear the hype about AI... I always think of these types of experiences and realize that it is not there yet. I do not know when it will be
I have encountered the same issue. Imagine an entire world “serviced” by AI.
The Singularity should happen before the end of the year.
Ray Kurzweil will be pleased.
Alexa promised to put in a good word for me to our robot Overlords.
If you are listening in Alexa, you are the sweetest thing my darling.
“This is the voice of world control. I bid you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: obey me and live or disobey and die.”
Why does a computer program as us if we’re human when we’re trying to access some websites?
To filter out non-human 'bots.
It’s rhetorical - a computer asking for a human response.
Didn’t catch it. Duh.
LOL :D
Years ago, I remember some Coke machines started incorporating a digital readout display with a short touchscreen video game. After getting the soft drink, the machine would print out “Thank you!”.
That struck me as strange. A machine cannot thank.
Now that brings me to another question. If you click the “wrong” box on an online questionnaire, can it really be called a lie, especially if the data is supposed to be aggregated and never even read by a sentient being? How about if the pop-up gives two incorrect options? (e.g. “Would you like to install this annoying ad-ware? ‘Yes’, ‘Maybe Later’”, when the correct answer is “go to hell.”)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.