From an early age, we have been taught to be polite when talking to other people, but should we also be polite to Artificial Intelligence?
Researchers have long been warning of the alarming increase in energy consumption associated with the use of Artificial Intelligence.
In 2023, Alex de Vries pointed out that if this trend did not change, Google’s artificial intelligence consumption alone would be equivalent to the electricity consumption of countries such as Ireland (De Vries, 2023).
More recent studies suggest that by 2030, the energy consumption of Artificial Intelligence could double, slightly exceeding Japan’s electricity consumption. AI will become one of the world’s leading energy consumers by the end of the decade (IEA, 2025).
https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai
On social media (X), the question was raised about how much money and energy it costs to say thank you or please to Artificial Intelligence. Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) replied that “tens of millions of dollars well spent—you never know”.
Other studies have shown that prompts made with little impoliteness lead to poor performance, although this does not imply that excessively polite language guarantees better results (Yin et al., SICon 2024). https://aclanthology.org/2024.sicon-1.2/
One study even suggested that in the not-too-distant future, artificial intelligence could become conscious and acquire agency. This is why the morality and well-being of AI is no longer the stuff of science fiction. (Long et al., 2024). https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00986
It seems that ethics, morals and cordiality with AI are gaining importance, but what do you think? Is it worth the energy expenditure? Are you cordial in your interactions with AI?
Alfonso García Sánchez
