I was reading an article on The Conversation earlier.
It was about whether adding “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT prompts wastes energy.
The idea behind it
The article says every word has a cost. A bit more computing. A bit more electricity.
That’s true. Technically.
If you add words, the system does slightly more work. There’s no way around that.
What gets left out
The scale almost disappears when you think about it. A few extra tokens compared to everything else happening in those systems.
Training. Storage. Images. Video.
The politeness barely registers.
And the article brushes past something quieter. Why people do it in the first place.
Most people aren’t trying to be efficient. They’re just typing how they talk.
Stopping without “please” feels rude to them. Ending without “thank you” feels unfinished.
Where this ends up
Those words aren’t really for the machine. They’re for the person sitting at the keyboard.
A small habit carrying over. Nothing more than that.
And it doesn’t feel like an energy problem so much as a human one.
That’s where my head landed.
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