Dave Webster

Cross-Posted from where I put it on LinkedIn: I am writing a longer piece on politeness to AI and ethics, but in light of Sam Altman’s recent comments – I asked Claude GAI (very nicely) to extract a 250 word summary from my draft – which I have (quite heavily) edited and is here:

We often joke about treating AI assistants politely to curry favour with our “future robot overlords.” But beneath the humour lies something more profound: the power of habit.

When I see people interact with AI rudely—typing commands like “make it shorter” without please or thank you—I find myself thinking less of them. This isn’t mere sentimentality; there’s philosophical weight to these reactions.
Kant, while living before the era of thinking machines, offered valuable insights about how we should treat non-human entities. For Kant, being kind to animals wasn’t a direct duty to them, but rather an “indirect duty to humanity.” By treating animals well, we cultivate moral habits that affect how we treat fellow humans.

Similarly, how we interact with AI systems shapes our character. Each time we communicate with technology, we’re practicing patterns of interaction that spill over into our human relationships. Digital civility is moral training ground.
We don’t need to believe AI has feelings to see the value in treating these systems with courtesy. The true benefit is to ourselves and our communities—maintaining the habit of respect regardless of who (or what) we’re addressing.

Being polite to AI isn’t about anthropomorphising technology or insurance against some dystopian robo-future. It’s about who we are choosing to be right now, in each interaction, digital or otherwise.

How we speak reflects who we are, even when no one human is listening.