Politeness with AI: an unsuspected environmental cost

Did you know that? These nice words exchanged with ChatGPT have a very real environmental cost.

The paradox of digital politeness

In our daily interactions, politeness is free and valued. “Thank you”, “please”, “could you”... These forms of courtesy are part of our education and our culture. But what about when our interlocutor is an artificial intelligence?

A surprising revelation from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is urging us to reconsider this habit. Each “thank you” or “please” sent to ChatGPT represents additional energy consumption. Globally, these polite phrases could cost tens of millions of dollars in electricity!

How does this phenomenon work?

To understand this paradox, we need to look at how major language models like ChatGPT work:

The token system : Each word, each character that we send to the AI is treated as a “token”. The more tokens you send, the more tokens the system needs to process.
Energy consumption : The processing of these tokens requires intensive calculations on huge servers that consume a lot of electricity.
The scale effect : If a single “thank you” seems negligible, multiply it by millions of daily users, and the impact becomes considerable.

Figures that give you food for thought

According to estimates, a simple exchange with ChatGPT can consume between 2.9 and 8.4 watt hours of electricity. For comparison, this is approximately the energy required to boil a cup of water in an electric kettle.

Each additional word added to your query increases this consumption. If the polite phrase represents 10% to 20% of the words in a request, we quickly understand the extent of the phenomenon on a global scale.

Should we stop being polite to AIs?

This question raises an interesting dilemma:

On one side, energy efficiency would suggest being concise and to the point, with no polite frills.
On the other, our social habits and the way we interact with entities that seem intelligent naturally push us towards politeness.

Some experts suggest that our interactions with AI also influence our human behaviors. Could being rude to virtual assistants make us less courteous in our human relationships?

Towards an eco-responsible digital label

A balanced approach could include:

Reserve polite phrases for human interactions
Adopt a concise but precise language with AIs
Combine multiple questions into a single query rather than going back and forth
Prepare questions in advance to avoid multiple clarifications

Conclusion

Ironic, no? For once, politeness is more expensive than efficiency! This reality invites us to rethink our relationship with digital technologies and their environmental impact.

The AI era is presenting us with new ethical dilemmas where traditional values like courtesy clash with modern concerns like carbon footprint.