Does using please and thank you actually improve AI responses

[Rory_39]

There is genuine evidence this can matter, though probably not for the reason most people assume. Researchers have found that politeness in a prompt can measurably change output quality on certain tasks, likely because polite phrasing in training data tends to correlate with more careful, detailed human writing, so the model has learned to associate that tone with a more thorough kind of response.

It is not that the model has feelings that get hurt by rudeness. Since nothing resembling that exists in the underlying mechanism, it is that politeness functions as a subtle signal about the kind of response being requested, similar to how a more formal request to a person tends to get a more formal and careful reply in return.

The effect size reported in actual studies is generally modest rather than dramatic. And it varies noticeably by task and by specific model, meaning this is genuinely more of a minor optimization than some kind of secret unlock that transforms output quality on its own.

What clearly matters far more than tone is specificity and clarity in the actual request itself. A precisely worded rude prompt will consistently outperform a vague but extremely polite one, so politeness functions as a small additional lever rather than the primary thing actually driving output quality.

Worth noting some companies have also mentioned that politeness in prompts costs a small amount of extra computing resources at scale. Which is a genuinely different and more practical reason some people choose to skip it entirely regardless of any output quality effect