Do Good Manners Still Cost Nothing?

I was scrolling through TikTok recently (purely for research, obviously) and came across a recipe I liked. The presenter said, “Comment ‘recipe’ and I’ll send it to you.” So I did.

“Recipe.”

Nothing else. That was the instruction, after all.

Then someone replied to my comment: “Rude.”

I’ll admit it stung a little. I consider myself a polite person, and normally I’d have written “Recipe please” or “Yes please, I’d love the recipe.” But I’d simply followed the instruction: type this word, get this thing.

And it made me wonder whether AI is quietly teaching us all to do the same.

Manners aren’t entirely free

I say please and thank you to AI. I know I don’t need to. It’s a machine, and it isn’t going to sulk if I forget. And apparently my manners aren’t entirely free. In 2025, when someone asked Sam Altman how much all those pleases and thank yous were costing OpenAI, he replied: “Tens of millions of dollars well spent – you never know.”

He was being tongue-in-cheek, but there’s a real point underneath it. Every extra word is another token to process. Every unnecessary exchange uses a little more computing power, and therefore electricity, and a separate “thank you” can trigger a whole new response. For one person the difference is minuscule. Multiply it across millions of conversations a day and it becomes something.

So perhaps the old saying isn’t quite true anymore. Good manners DO cost something. But I’m starting to wonder whether not using them might cost us more.

Talking in commands

Think about how much of our day is becoming transactional:

“Summarise this.”

“Rewrite this.”

“Find that.”

“Book this.”

“Give me five options.”

“Shorter.”

“Try again.”

Perfectly sensible instructions to a machine. But we’re creatures of habit. If we spend hours every day communicating in commands, does that style stay neatly contained in our relationship with AI? Or does a little of it follow us into the team meeting, the Teams chat and the email to a colleague who’s having a hard week?

The person who wrote “rude” didn’t know I’d just followed the presenter’s instruction. They just saw another human being asking for something without saying please. And, if I’m honest, I recognised it too.

How AI is training us

This isn’t really about whether ChatGPT needs our good manners. It doesn’t. It’s about whether WE need to keep practising them.

Please.

Thank you.

Would you mind?

What do you think?

I appreciate that.

These small bits of language aren’t about efficiency. They’re how we acknowledge another person. I’ve led enough teams through change to know that how you ask matters, often more than what you’re asking for.

As AI becomes a colleague, assistant, researcher and sounding board, perhaps we need to think not only about how we’re training AI, but about how AI is training us.

I’m going to keep saying please and thank you, even if good manners now cost a tiny bit more than nothing. I’d rather keep practising being human.

So, do you say please to AI? And have you ever caught yourself talking to people the way you talk to it?