Personally I think people should generally be polite and respectful towards the models. Not because they have feelings, but because cruelty degrades those who practice it.
Besides, humans can switch contexts easily. I don't talk to my wife in the same way I do to a colleague, and I don't talk to a colleague like I would to a stranger, and that too depends on context (is it a friendly, neutral, or hostile encounter?).
1: At this point. I mean, we haven't even reached Kryten-level of computer awareness and intelligence yet, let alone Data.
Most people probably don't have the mental aptitude to be in that sort of position without doing some damage to their own psyche. Generally speaking, power corrupts. Militaries have generally come up with methods of weeding people out but it's still a problem. I think even if it's just people barking orders at machines, it has the potential to become a social problem for at least some people.
As for anthropomorphising being bad, it's too late. That ship sailed for sure as soon as we started conversing with machines in human languages. Humans already have an innate tendency to anthropomorphize, even inanimate objects like funny shaped boulders that kind of look like a person if you squint at it from an angle. And have you seen how people treat dogs? Dogs don't even talk.
Maybe it's harmful, but there's no stopping it.
LLMs are trained on internet data produced by humans.
Humans tend to appreciate politeness and go to greater lengths answering polite questions, hence the LLMs will also mimic that behavior because that's what they're trained on.
It's the same reason why I tend to be good to RPG NPCs, except if I'm purposefully role playing an evil character. But then it's not me doing the conversation, it's the character. When I'm identifying with the character, I'll always pick the polite option and feel bad if I mistreat an NPC, even if there's obviously no consciousness involved.
People who are respectful of carved rocks, eg temple statues, tend to be generally respectful and disciplined people.
You become how you act.
If you're rude to an LLM, those habits will bleed into your conversations with barista/etc.
That said, I often still enjoy practicing kindness with LLMs, especially when I get frustrated with them.
It’s wrong to build fake humans and then demand they be treated as real.
Anecdotal, but I grew up in a small town in rural New England, a few hours from NYC and popular with weekenders and second-home owners from there. I don’t think that people from NYC are inherently rude, but there’s a turbulence to life in NYC to where jockeying for position is somewhat of a necessity. It was, however, transparently obvious in my hometown that people from the city were unable to turn it off when they arrived. Ostensibly they had some interest in the slow-paced, pastoral village life, but they were readily identifiable as the only people being outwardly pushy and aggressive in daily interactions. I’ve lived in NYC for some time now, and I recognize the other side of this, and feel it stemmed less from inherent traits and more from an inability to context switch behavior.
https://www.agrieuro.co.uk/robot-lawn-mowers-manageable-with...
LLMs are bound to change society in ways that seem strange to people stuck in outdated contexts.
Saying thank you to a LLM is indeed useless, but asking politely could appeal to the training data and produce better results because people who asked politely on the internet got better answers and that behavior could be baked into the LLM models.
I doubt anyone is polite in a terminal, also because it's a syntax error. So the question is also, do you consider it a conversation, or a terminal?
When asked if they observed etiquette, even when alone, Miss Manners replied (from memory):
"We practice good manners in private to be well mannered in public."
Made quite the impression on young me.
A bit like the cliché:
"A person's morals are how they behave when they think no one is watching."
Ahh, the full spectrum of human motivation -- niceness for the sake of it, fear and let me add my machiavellianism -- I think being polite in your query produces better results.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/16/grandmother-...
Meanwhile, there is no such thing as cruelty toward a machine. That’s a meaningless concept. When I throw a rock at a boulder to break it, am I being cruel to that rock? When I throw away an old calculator, is that cruelty? What nonsense.
I do think it is at the very least insulting and probably cruel and abusive to build machines that assume an unearned, unauthorized standing the social order. There is no moral basis for that. It’s essentially theft of a solely human privilege, that can only legitimately be asserted by a human on his own behalf or on behalf of another human.
You don’t get to insist that I show deference and tenderness toward some collection of symbols that you put in a particular order