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Comment by dogprez | Hacker News Reader

Others pointed out the value of silence, but I just wanted to say it saddens me when humanity is misclassified as inefficiency. The other day Sam Altman made a jest about how much energy is wasted by people saying "thanks" to chatgpt. The corollary is how much human energy is wasted on humans saying thanks to each other. When making a judgement about inefficiency one is making a judgement on what is valuable, a very biased judgement that isn't necessarily aligned with what makes us thrive. =) (<-- a wasteful smiley)

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Well, humans saying thanks to eachother isn't wasted energy. It has a real affect on our relationships.

People say thank you to AI because they are portrayed as human-like chat bots, but in reality it has almost no effect on their effectiveness to respond to our queries.

Saying thank you to ChatGPT is no less wasteful than saying thank you to Windows for opening the calculator.

I don't think anyone is trying to draw any parallels between that inefficiency and real humans saying thank you?

Saying thank you might still make sense in theory with AI, if AI used this as a clue to learn how useful the response was. Currently there is thumbs up and down, but it is very possible that there are mid conversation effects of it in the same context.

I’ll remember that you told me thanks. Will chatgpt? (Honestly curious… it’s possible)

I get the impression that it sets a tone that encourages creative, more open ended responses.

I think this is the reverse of confrontation with the LLM. Typically if you get a really dumb response, it is better to hang up the conversation and completely start over than it is to tell the LLM why it is wrong. Once you start arguing, they start getting stupider and respond with even faultier logic as they try to appease you.

I suppose it makes sense if the training involves alternate models of discourse resembling two educated people in a forum with shared intellectual curiosity and a common goal, or two people having a ridiculous internet argument.

I say thanks for my own well-being too.

Humans are inefficient. The mistake is making a moral judgement about that.

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