Don’t say ‘please’: How being polite to AI may be costing you and the environment

When speaking to an artificial intelligence model, you may, on instinct, start your prompt with “please” and end it with “thank you.” It could make interacting with the tool feel more natural or ease your fears of retaliation should the AI ever gain sentience or start a robot uprising. But while taking the time to be polite may seem inconsequential, it comes at a cost.

When an X user posted a question asking how much OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people being courteous, Sam Altman, the CEO of the AI research and deployment company, responded, “tens of millions of dollars well spent–you never know.”

According to a United Nations University study, the more words you use when speaking to AI, the more energy it consumes. The study revealed that reducing word use by 30% when using AI could lower its energy usage by 25%, saving the same amount of electricity used in a year by 700,000 people in Africa, per the Associated Press.

The use of AI is a direct contributor to the growth of data centers, the study reports, and accounts for 20% of their energy. That is projected to increase to 40% by 2030, when data centers are predicted to use more power than all but five countries in the world, says the AP.

The politeness problem

Even though AI is tech, with no feelings or consciousness, a large number of people err on the side of kindness when using chatbots and generative AI. According to a survey conducted by Future, 67% of U.S. AI users are polite to it, and per a Pew Research Center survey, 54% of people who own smart speakers like Amazon Echo or Google Home say “please” when speaking to their device.

For many, they may want to treat AI with kindness because the tech mimics personhood. Sherry Turkle, who studies relationships between humans and AI at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said, “If an object is alive enough for us to start having intimate conversations, friendly conversations, treating it as a really important person in our lives, even though it’s not, it’s alive enough for us to show courtesy to,” according to the New York Times.

Being polite to AI has other uses that encourage users to act mannerly, such as by improving its performance. According to TechRadar, A.J. Ghergich, a global vice president of Botify, said, “Studies show that when we’re polite, we trigger patterns in the AI that connect to helpful, detailed human communication. Polite prompts can improve AI performance by up to 30%.”

Another reason to treat AI mannerly appears to be a fear of a robot uprising. According to the study by Future, 18% of the people surveyed said they are polite in case of an AI revolt, hoping that their kindness may reward them.

The cost

The cost of AI is being felt now, as data centers across the globe used 448 trillion watt-hours of electricity in 2025, more than all but 10 countries, said the UNU report.

AI-related data centers can threaten communities’ water supply, increase power bills, cause excessive noise, use massive amounts of land, and impose climate and health risks due to air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, according to the World Resources Institute.

While the organizations that build and manage data centers can implement a variety of strategies to reduce emissions and the facilities’ impacts on their surrounding communities, AI users can manage their own energy usage by being less polite and more concise when using the tech, even if it goes against their instincts or fear of a hypothetical robotic reckoning.