- Rishi Sunak noted AI politeness increases compute power and advised against it with chatbots
- Sunak's daughters prefer politeness with AI as a precaution if AI takes over the world
- A survey found 69% of Gen Z use courteous language with chatbots to improve interactions
Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has once again spotlighted an unusual cost of artificial intelligence - politeness. Speaking at the NDTV AI Summit, Sunak shared how his daughters say "please" and "thank you" while interacting with chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, prompting him to advise them otherwise.
"My two young girls, when they use these models and the chatbots and they're going back and forth on things, they're very polite and they always say please and thank you when they go through their um conversations. I said to them, I said, 'you know what, you don't, you don't need to say please and thank you. It's polite, but it's not a person. And by the way, it, it takes up a lot of compute power, so better if you don't'," Sunak said during a fireside chat with NDTV's Editor-in-Chief Rahul Kanwal.
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His daughters, he added humorously, disagreed: "Daddy, if AI takes over the world, we want to have been polite to the AI. I thought it was a good insurance policy."
Sunak's remarks come amid growing discussion about the hidden costs of AI interactions. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an exchange on X last year that the company spends "tens of millions of dollars" in electricity on polite user exchanges - though he described it as "well spent" in the pursuit of more human-like systems.
A 2025 survey on Gen Z behaviour found that over 69% of respondents use courteous language with chatbots.
Some AI experts argue politeness may actually improve responses. In a note for Microsoft WorkLab, design manager Kurtis Beavers said respectful prompts often generate more collaborative outputs, as generative AI tends to mirror tone, clarity and professionalism.
AI tools also consume significantly more energy than traditional searches. A 2024 Goldman Sachs report estimated that a single chatbot query uses about 2.9 watt-hours of electricity, compared with roughly 0.3 watt-hours for a standard Google search.
Meanwhile, another AI pioneer speaking at the summit, Stuart Russell, warned about long-term risks of advanced AI systems, saying that even its creators believe the technology that has a significant chance of causing human extinction.
Russell called for safeguards such as mandatory system registration and the ability for regulators to shut down harmful AI through a "kill switch".
"Once systems start replicating themselves, that's a way of escaping human control," said the man, also called the "godfather of AI", warning that technical oversight will be critical as AI capabilities expand.
