May 26, 2025, 9:29 am | Read time: 4 minutes
Politeness is valued even in the digital world—even when chatting with artificial intelligence. What is meant to be nice has surprising consequences: Every polite request to ChatGPT incurs costs. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently explained why this is the case.
Even though the comment sections on social media are filled with posts that must have been written with a lot of froth at the mouth, most people pay attention to polite language in the digital world. This also applies to interactions with AI language models. “Please” and “Thank you” are quite common when making requests to ChatGPT. However, politeness costs OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, a lot of money.
Every Instance of Politeness in Artificial Intelligence Costs
Artificial intelligence (AI) may seem intangible at first glance—but behind every request lies a significant resource expenditure. This becomes particularly clear when it comes to seemingly harmless polite phrases. A humorous exchange on X (formerly Twitter) brought this topic to light, and it raises questions about how we interact with AI in everyday life.
The OpenAI CEO responded to a user’s post that said, “I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost on electricity costs because people say please and thank you to their models.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman replied, “Tens of millions of dollars well spent—you never know.” With this, he intentionally or unintentionally sparked a discussion about how we will communicate with AI models in the future.
The massive data centers behind the large AI models consume a lot of energy in the form of electricity and water, which is necessary for cooling. This is well-known. Every tiny request and every single word thus becomes an ecological cost factor.
AI Has an Immense Energy Consumption
The U.S. newspaper “Washington Post,” together with the University of California, found out (behind a paywall): Creating an email with 100 words consumes about 0.14 kilowatt-hours of electricity. With more than five billion visits to ChatGPT in April 2025, the chosen example alone results in a multi-million dollar amount.
The water consumption also adds up. To generate such an email, cooling requires 518 milliliters of water. The university researchers then assumed that ten percent of the working population in the U.S. would have such an email formulated by ChatGPT per week. This would result in a water consumption of 435 million liters. In Germany, a person uses about 130 liters of water per day. Thus, the cooling water could supply over 3 million German citizens with water for a day.
Politeness and Efficiency Don’t Mix in Artificial Intelligence
Does AI communication need to be completely rethought due to these massive numbers? This is a matter of debate among scientists. Some AI experts believe that those who make polite requests receive higher-quality responses. Another group considers politeness irrelevant to the quality of AI-generated responses.
The latter assumption seems plausible, as AI does not act humanly but generates its responses based on learned data. In the end, it’s all mathematics. Mathematical formulas are based on logic. Politeness logically does not change the result.
However, there are other reasons why it makes sense not to forgo politeness. Ultimately, today’s AI requests form the training data of tomorrow. Moreover, it also concerns the way people want to communicate with each other. Those who only type requests in a commanding tone may get used to seeing others as mere command receivers in normal conversations.
Does a full refrigerator consume more electricity than an empty one?
ChatGPT Creators Plan Their Own Alternative to X
Image Generation with ChatGPT Allows Forgery of Receipts and Vouchers
Seeking Technical Solutions
How can this dilemma between courtesy and energy efficiency be resolved? Perhaps a unique, more efficient AI language will develop that forgoes usual polite forms but remains respectful in tone.
The developers of the major AI models are already working on a solution to reduce energy consumption. Future versions will recognize words like “please” and “thank you” as mere politeness and ignore them when generating responses. However, there are countless linguistic nuances that an AI system would first have to learn and then recognize as politeness.
It will take quite a while until such an AI model functions almost flawlessly and consumes less energy at the same time. Forgoing words like “thank you” would at least be a small, efficient step that everyone could take without immediately being considered rude.