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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

I was taken aback when I recently noticed a co-worker thanking ChatGPT for its answer.

LLMs talk like people; there is nothing wrong with this. It's perfectly fine to be nice to something even if it isn't human. It's why we don't go around kicking dogs for fun.

I understand why people don't act polite to LLMs, but honestly I think not thanking them will make people act more dickish to other humans.

I like to think we can perceive a difference between a machine and a living being. I don't thank my bicycle for transporting me or thank my spell-checker for finding typos. I get that we are prone to anthropomorphize but was just something I found a bit surprising.

>I don't thank my bicycle for transporting me or thank my spell-checker for finding typos.

Neither your bicycle nor your spell-checker hold conversations and answer questions, neither of them is being used as therapist or virtual girl/boy friend, and neither's whole shtick is being trained on a ginormous human corpus to convincingly respond like a person.

I like to think we can perceive a difference between a bicycle and an something specifically developed and trained to pass for intelligence...

See, i have absolutely thanked my car. When i was broke driving a beater and it was below zero outside, practically every time it chose to start lol

I don't think it's that weird

I occasionally say please and thank you to ChatGPT for my own sake, not for the LLM's. They're sufficiently similar to humans that allowing myself to be a jerk subtly degrades myself and makes it more likely that I'm a jerk to real people.

From a year ago https://www.vice.com/en/article/telling-chatgpt-please-and-t...

People have been thanking Siri back 15 years ago, it’s just a reflex.

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