Last week OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman shared an interesting statistic: the polite inclusion of “please” and “thank you” in many users’ ChatGPT prompts costs the company millions of dollars in compute expenses every year. On the face of it, that sounds absurd. Why are we wasting huge amounts of electricity on courtesies that mean nothing to a large language model?

Fifty-five percent of Americans say they speak politely to chatbots because “It’s the nice thing to do” while another 12% say they do it because they want to keep their future AI overlords happy. These answers sound pretty straightforward, although we might wonder how serious some of those in the second group are. But if we dig a little deeper we can see that the way we talk to chatbots offers a window onto some fascinating features of the human mind.

So, why do we instinctively treat non‑conscious software as though it possesses an inner life?

The simplest answer is convenience. Polite speech is the default setting we practise all our lives with other humans. Abandoning it when we talk to bots forces the brain to switch to a new conversational rulebook. That mental gear‑shift is tiny but constant, so most people let the old habits run. Life is just easier that way.

As we discuss in our book Transcend: Unlocking Humanity in the Age........

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