Being courteous pays

 

New research reveals a compelling dual benefit to treating AI systems with respect:

 it not only enhances our leadership abilities but also improves the quality of AI outputs.Adobe Stock

Being courteous pays. It can save your life, garner new friends and help engender success, characteristics most valuable when navigating the vagaries of life in a most uncertain world. With this in mind, being polite when dealing with AI also pays off, something not thought to be true but is, without question.

In my latest conversation with ChatGPT, I caught myself saying "please" and "thank you." My wife, overhearing this, couldn't help but laugh at my politeness toward a machine. Had I gone too far in humanizing AI, or was I onto something more profound?

What The Research Says About AI And Politeness

It turns out science is backing up what might seem like excessive digital courtesy. Recent research has uncovered a fascinating dual benefit to treating AI systems with respect: not only does it significantly improve the quality of AI outputs, but it also enhances our leadership capabilities in ways we're only beginning to understand.

Politeness Delivers Better AI Outputs

Let's start with the performance aspect. Recent research has revealed politeness isn't just about etiquette – it measurably improves AI performance. The study, which examined AI behavior across English, Chinese, and Japanese languages, found that impolite prompts often resulted in poorer performance, including increased errors, stronger biases, and notable omissions of important information.

Most compellingly, when researchers tested different levels of politeness across tasks like summarization and language understanding benchmarks, they discovered that more polite prompts consistently outperformed rude ones, with some models showing up to a 30% drop in performance with impolite prompts. The research also revealed that different AI models respond to politeness in culturally nuanced ways, suggesting that just as with human interactions, cultural context matters in how we communicate with AI.

Politeness Improves Emotional Intelligence And Company Culture

Let’s take a deeper look at the leadership aspect where other research has uncovered a compelling phenomenon: people who maintain professional courtesy in their AI interactions tend to demonstrate stronger emotional intelligence in human relationships. This isn't just about being nice – it's about rewiring our brain's social circuitry for better leadership outcomes. Think about it: If you're the kind of leader who barks orders at ChatGPT, how likely are you to maintain patience and respect when dealing with your team under pressure?

Makes sense to me. :)