Feb 26, 2024 - Technology

Being nice to chatbots pays off

Ryan Heath

Illustration of a human hand and a computer cursor hand engaged in a handshake — Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios

It pays to be nice to your AI: Large language models (LLMs) tend to give better answers when prompted respectfully and failure to do that can "significantly affect LLM performance," per a new cross-cultural research paper.

Why it matters: Your prompt may affect the answer you get today — and also how well an AI model can answer for everyone else tomorrow.

"Impolite prompts may lead to a deterioration in model performance, including generations containing mistakes, stronger biases, and omission of information," the researchers found.

What they did: The researchers tested a half-dozen chatbots against dozens of tasks, using up to 150 prompts per task.

What they found: LLMs mirror certain human communication traits, which means politeness toward chatbots tends to generate better responses, just as politeness does in human conversation.

The thesis proved true across English, Chinese and Japanese prompts and with each chatbot tested.
"Impolite prompts often result in poor performance, but excessive flattery is not necessarily welcome," the researchers found.
One effect of excessively rude or flattering prompts was that they generated longer answers in English and Chinese.

Reality check: Chatbots are not sentient, and your politeness isn't making them feel good.

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Being nice to chatbots pays off

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