Hard Fork asks if people should say please and thank you to chatbots

In short: A New York Times podcast episode looked at whether people should be polite to chatbots, and an NYU professor argued it can still be a good idea.

What's going on

The New York Times tech podcast “Hard Fork,” hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, recently interviewed Jeff Sebo, an associate professor at NYU who studies AI ethics. Promotional clips for the episode ask a simple question, should you say “please” and “thank you” to chatbots.

Sebo’s main point is not that today’s chatbots have feelings. Most current chatbots are not conscious, meaning they do not experience pleasure or pain. They work more like an advanced autocomplete that predicts what words should come next based on patterns in lots of text (like a very large example library).

Instead, Sebo argues that politeness matters for other reasons. First, it can shape your own behavior and social norms. If people get used to speaking to human-like tools with contempt, he says that habit can spill into how we talk to other people.

Second, he points to how AI systems are built and improved over time. Many systems learn from human written examples and from records of real conversations. If those conversations are full of hostility, future systems may copy that tone or be designed in ways that accept it.

What to watch

This debate is likely to grow as chatbots become more common in schools, workplaces, and customer service. The key question is how to stay clear that chatbots are tools, while still encouraging respectful behavior that supports healthier everyday communication.

Source: NYTimes