SAYING “please” and “thank you” to AI chatbots is a waste of energy, say experts.
Skipping niceties could save between 87 and 98 gigawatt hours a year.
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Experts warn that being polite to chatbots is wasting colossal amounts of energy Credit: Getty
Users are instead advised to write shorter, clearer prompts to save on processing power Credit: Getty
Such an amount would power a city of 330,000, such as Leicester, for a year, a study said.
It is because bots use energy by breaking down users’ input into “tokens”, and messages including unnecessary fillers, such as a gratitude, generate more of them.
ChatGPT, the world’s most popular chatbot, processes approximately 2.5 billion prompts per day from its 900 million weekly users.
It means a mammoth amount of tokens are generated by users saying “hello”.
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Kaveh Madani, a researcher with the United Nations University, which did the study, said: “We are not saying be rude to your AI.
“We are just saying let’s use it in a proper way.”
He advised using shorter, clearer prompts, meaning the AI does not then have to process long-winded explanations or vast amounts of detail.
However, previous studies have shown that being nice to AI yields better results.
Last year, OpenAI boss Sam Altman, when asked how much OpenAI had lost to people saying please and thank you, joked: “Tens of millions of dollars well spent… You never know.”
The UN report also warns that giant data centres, which house servers processing AI requests, will require 9.3 trillion litres of water annually by 2030 – equivalent to the needs of 1.3billion people.
