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.
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.