Mathematician reveals genius reason you should always say please and thank you to AI

A mathematician has revealed a genius reason you should always say please and thank you to AI.

While artificially intelligent chatbots might not have human emotion, there is apparently an important reason why you should still be polite when asking for their assistance.

And according to one YouTuber, it’s ‘not just so that AI will spare you when the apocalypse comes’.

Instead, Hannah Fry, who is known online as @fryrsquared, has revealed the real reason why we should all be nicer to AI assistants.

In a video, she explained: “I’m sure you’ve seen all sorts of posts telling you what prompt to use to get the most out of your language model. I think you can pretty much forget all of that because there’s only really one important thing to remember which is that the AI that we have now is really, really, really good at roleplaying.

“So you shouldn’t talk to it like it’s a Google search or like you’re trying to extract information from it, as though it’s Wikipedia.

“Instead, you should talk to it as though it’s an improvisational actor that can be any character imaginable and the reason for this is that large language models don't store facts like it’s a database.

“They generate responses dynamically based on having read everything that humans have ever written and the prompt that you give it, and that means that AI - the stuff we have now - doesn't have this stable identity, it doesn’t have a fixed worldview.

One YouTuber says it's important to be polite to chatbots (Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images)

“It doesn’t have personal beliefs and so if you prompt it in a particular way, it will respond in kind. “If you try and prompt it as though it’s a Shakespearean bard then it will give you a flowery response. If you try and prompt it as though it is an extremely effective and smart scientist, it will give you the relevant response.

“But if you prompt it as though it’s an encyclopedia, it’s going to try and sound like one but it’s still just performing a role and you've effectively just restricted what it can do.”

Many viewers took to the YouTube comment section to share their reactions to the clip.

One user wrote: “The reason is actually very simple. The polite words shifts the string matching slightly and increases the likelihood of getting a more polite answer.”

And another added: “Wow, finally, someone explained AI prompting in a way that just clicked! I've been trying to figure out how to make those chatbots actually useful, and this 'improv actor' idea makes so much sense. I'm excited to try this out and see if I can actually get some good results now.”