[AgentMatt]

I don't think that's weird at all.

Even if we know it's a machine we're interacting with, since the instructions we give are so similar in form to how we interact with people, I'd be very surprised if those interactions wouldn't affect how we communicate in general. After all, we are creatures of habit to a much larger degree than most would like to admit.

So I'm in the same boat: I'd much rather "look silly" being polite / kind to a machine, than have the most effective way of using it decay the kindness I'm habituated to express towards people.

[sieste]

I have a different approach. Just treat all LLM queries as what they are, instructions to a computer program to generate a desired output. Neither niceties nor insults make a qualitative difference, so you might as well just skip them altogether.

It's a bit as if shell commands added im/politeness arguments that do nothing other than making you feel better about the interaction, like

    git pull --please

or

    ls --forthemillionthtime

I wouldn't use those either.

[recursive]

See INTERCAL[0]

> If "PLEASE" does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if it appears too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL#Details

[mrguyorama]

But your mental model is wrong. The "please" or "for fucks sake just..." would both be part of the "instructions" and because of how the system is built and created, demonstrably produce different outputs.

Thankfully the difference is 4%, so nobody should really care one way or the other.