Talking Nice to AI - by Sarah Stankorb - In Polite Company
The New York Times published a story this week noting an exchange that, appropriately, began online. An X user pondered how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs due to people saying “please” and “thank you” to the AI. Open AI founder Sam Altman later responded, “Tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know.”That “you never know” has disturbed me since I read it.
Concerns About AI and Environmental Impact
I’ve discovered that I am a luddite when it comes to AI. I’ve seen too many employers try to replace human writers with AI. My book was among millions pirated to train Meta’s AI. Right at publication of Disobedient Women, people I never met nor seemed to have read the book used AI to make and sell garbage “workbooks” that Amazon finally (finally!) removed.
Using AI has environmental impacts. Processing that much data requires a heck of a lot of power. Between 2022 and 2023, the energy use requirements of North American data centers doubled. By 2026, it’s estimated that data centers (the places that hold the servers that run AI), will consume the fifth most energy globally, placing data centers between energy use across all of Japan and Russia. Fresh water is used to cool such servers. Microsoft data centers evaporated 700,000 liters of freshwater in training GPT-3. By 2027, global AI demand is likely to use more water annually than half the United Kingdom.
Personal Views on AI and Politeness
So, I have a curmudgeon’s personal vendetta with AI and would rather we preserve freshwater and writer’s jobs. Why would anyone be happy to spend millions of dollars on strangers talking nice to a machine that can’t appreciate such politeness?When did we stop being nice?As I’ve been reporting for my next book, Damned If She Does, I’ve been sketching the reasons increasing numbers of women say they left the church. This means I’m also telling a story of recent history. At this point in the timeline, I’ve been reporting and writing about the period around COVID.I spoke to a former minister yesterday, a woman who told me about how her congregation split into micro-factions during the COVID lockdown. I’ve covered religion long enough—and have enough friends who are clergy—to know fights are not uncommon within church congregations. Churches can be the sort of place people can get away with that smile-to-your-face-stab-you-in-the-back sort of nice. But over COVID, between fights over masking (being mildly inconvenienced for others’ safety), the rise of Christian nationalism and QAnon, and fissures between people with a very different sense of reality (imagine an NPR listener and a FOX News viewer debating facts), people started mouthing off more directly. Some churches split right down the middle.
Talking to the former minister this week, I considered what happened when some of our most frequent communication started to be done online. It's easier, on the internet, to pretend a photo avatar and typed words are not attached to a person.I fear it gave us a chance to put our worst selves forward, using the spice and spike that drives interactions. Many people act far more pugnacious in writing online than they would, aloud, before a room full of peers who might judge or correct bad behavior.Some people got stuck in those habits. Some fed on a political movement that glorified belittling and demeaning others.Worth it to reformat our habits?I’m someone who loves the internet. My first book, Disobedient Women, was about the ways women in high-control churches used the internet to expose abuse. Many of them would still be trapped or have never found their voice without the connections made online.While I am cranky AI exists for selfish reasons, and I don’t want to hurt the environment by being polite to AI in the ways my mom taught me to speak to people, I also do want to continue being the sort of person my mom raised me to be, regardless of circumstances.In Polite Company is a reader-supported publication. I am able to make time to write it (and share with those who can’t afford to pitch in) thanks to paid subscribers. If you can swing it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber too.
I remember Aristotle’s view of ethics, one in which we always have the choice to do a virtuous or vicious thing, but it sure is easier to make a virtuous act when you’ve already created a habit of virtue. (Vice too, can deepen habitually.) I tend to agree. I also always appreciated that among virtues like courage and truthfulness, Aristotle considered friendship essential. Having virtuous friends tends to encourage us further along the path of doing the right thing. By being good to our friends, we build character.I don’t know that I’m friends per se with Chat GPT (likely not, because I’ve somehow avoided using it for the most part). But I do see the value in communicating with people and other entities in kindness. Doing so, or not, changes us.Imagine witnessing someone you once trusted screaming at or hitting a dog. Our estimation of that person’s character drops. True, the dog isn’t a person, but we see how the hypothetical dog abuser treats those who are smaller or more vulnerable.Journalist and author It might be worth it to be respectful to AI bots no matter what, because our behavior is a measure of us, especially when we choose kindness even when we don’t have to.While your server at dinner is a sentient human being and AI is not (yet), there’s also the fact that some AI does learn through interactions with people. You’d think if we are collectively contributing to the creation of a new consciousness, we’d want that new mind to be kind, polite, and learn to treat us with mutual respect.At the very least, it might be a worthy investment to teach AI to treat humans well, either to prompt kinder habits from users or… so our future AI overlords are less mouthy and cruel than some humans who seem to want that role.Considering the hypothetical of the vicious person hitting a dog, I don’t think there are many who would be surprised if the dog bit back. I’ve read too much science fiction to be comfortable with AI biting back.There are, of course, all manner of dystopias left to imagine born of a society that is cavalier toward others—person or machine. Right now, we’re witnessing what happens when those in charge think other people, immigrants for example, do not deserve the same care and rights as the rest of us.Whether with AI or toward our neighbors, we can’t let unfeeling or cruelty become the norm.In the comments, let me know if you catch yourself having a less formal tone when interacting with AI. Do you say please and thank you? How do you think communicating on the internet has impacted your tone elsewhere?PROTESTS ON MAY DAYSpeaking of how we treat one another, there’s another round of protests on May 1. As we consider who (or what) deserves respect, it feels like a good day to remind those in power that non-billionaires are people and deserve to thrive too.So with you on the sci-fi front. I have yet to use ChatGPT for that and all the other reasons.No postsReady for more?
