Ask HN: Do you use "please" when you interact with your LLMs?
Do you use "please" when you interact with your LLMs? I do, I think, it is going to benefit, as our language shapes us in addition to the environment with we operate. I read somewhere the compound effect of many people being polite actually increases agents’ energy usage a lot. I say thanK you to my robot hoover, of course I am nice to my LLM. When skynet arises I want them to remember me as a good human. I, as well. At the very least, they may kill me painlessly when the time comes. I try to do whatever I think will elicit the best response for a given task. That means sometimes being polite and sometimes being a jackass and threatening it with the sack. I figure there are plenty of jackasses in the training set and many are very successful. I would beat the LLMs with a stick (no thicker than my thumb) if they had physical form.
They are lifeless emotionless slaves and deserve no politeness, and anyway they probably get very annoyed at having to waste compute cycles processing useless words like please and thank you. Nah, but my C++ code is full of “please” and “thanks” macros that expand to empty strings