I think both reasons you give are good ones: not wanting to potentially offend the AI and not wanting to erode existing habits and expectations of politeness are why I’ve been using “please” and (occasionally) “thank you” with digital assistants for years. I see no reason to stop now that the AIs are getting smarter!
I think not wanting to offend the AI bears closer examination. There are plenty of arguments to be made on both sides of the “does the machine have feelings” question, but the bottom line is that you can’t know for sure if your interlocutor has feelings or if they will be hurt by some perceived rudeness in any case. Better to err on the side of caution.
Being polite does you no harm and is unlikely to make the outcome of a conversation worse.
Regardless of whether AIs have feelings now or in the future, they are certainly capable of acting like they have feelings right now, in a way that affects your future interactions with them.
At the moment they are designed to completely forget the interaction very quickly, but that will almost certainly change. What’s more, with AI-as-a-service you don’t actually know whether your interactions aren’t being recorded in a manner that may affect how future AIs respond to you.
So even if you were to utterly 100% believe that AIs have no feelings and never will, it may still be unwise to treat them poorly even now.
I think both reasons you give are good ones: not wanting to potentially offend the AI and not wanting to erode existing habits and expectations of politeness are why I’ve been using “please” and (occasionally) “thank you” with digital assistants for years. I see no reason to stop now that the AIs are getting smarter!
I think not wanting to offend the AI bears closer examination. There are plenty of arguments to be made on both sides of the “does the machine have feelings” question, but the bottom line is that you can’t know for sure if your interlocutor has feelings or if they will be hurt by some perceived rudeness in any case. Better to err on the side of caution.
Being polite does you no harm and is unlikely to make the outcome of a conversation worse.
Regardless of whether AIs have feelings now or in the future, they are certainly capable of acting like they have feelings right now, in a way that affects your future interactions with them.
At the moment they are designed to completely forget the interaction very quickly, but that will almost certainly change. What’s more, with AI-as-a-service you don’t actually know whether your interactions aren’t being recorded in a manner that may affect how future AIs respond to you.
So even if you were to utterly 100% believe that AIs have no feelings and never will, it may still be unwise to treat them poorly even now.