Anthropic has been the most histrionic about this, with their big blog post about how they need to make sure their models don't feel like they are being emotionally abused by the users being the most fatuous example.
LLMs talk like people; there is nothing wrong with this. It's perfectly fine to be nice to something even if it isn't human. It's why we don't go around kicking dogs for fun.
I understand why people don't act polite to LLMs, but honestly I think not thanking them will make people act more dickish to other humans.
I like to think we can perceive a difference between a machine and a living being. I don't thank my bicycle for transporting me or thank my spell-checker for finding typos. I get that we are prone to anthropomorphize but was just something I found a bit surprising.
>I don't thank my bicycle for transporting me or thank my spell-checker for finding typos.
Neither your bicycle nor your spell-checker hold conversations and answer questions, neither of them is being used as therapist or virtual girl/boy friend, and neither's whole shtick is being trained on a ginormous human corpus to convincingly respond like a person.
I like to think we can perceive a difference between a bicycle and an something specifically developed and trained to pass for intelligence...
I occasionally say please and thank you to ChatGPT for my own sake, not for the LLM's. They're sufficiently similar to humans that allowing myself to be a jerk subtly degrades myself and makes it more likely that I'm a jerk to real people.
They're trying to get government to hand them a moat. Spoilers... There's no moat.