![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/SEC_261504670-230b.jpg\")
\n\t\tTo any Britons reading this, you might need to resist the compulsive urge to be polite (Picture: Metro)<\/p>\n
\t\t
\n\t\tTo any Britons reading this, you might need to resist the compulsive urge to be polite (Picture: Metro)<\/p>\n
\u2018I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying \u201cplease\u201d and \u201cthank you\u201d to their models.\u2019<\/p>\n
This is a question that someone recently posed on X about ChatGPT<\/a>, OpenAI\u2019s virtual assistant powered by artificial intelligence <\/a>(AI).<\/p>\n And the answer is \u2018tens of millions of dollars\u2019, according to OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman.<\/p>\n tens of millions of dollars well spent\u2013you never know<\/p>\n \u2014 Sam Altman (@sama) April 16, 2025<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u2018Please\u2019 and \u2018thank you\u2019 are about as British as you can get. Eight in 10 Britons <\/a>are friendly to AI chatbots.<\/p>\n But being polite to AI comes at a cost \u2013 and not just financially. <\/p>\n ChatGPT gulps 39.16million gallons of water a day<\/p>\n Every time you ask ChatGPT to write an email, rip apart your Instagram profile<\/a> or plan your monthly budget<\/a>, it uses energy.<\/p>\n And this bot\u2019s electricity bills are an estimated 40million kilowatt-hours every day. That could charge 8million phones, according to Business Energy UK<\/a>.<\/p>\n Data centres \u2013 the engine rooms of AI \u2013 use water to stay cool. At least 39.16million gallons a day, to be precise.<\/p>\n That\u2019s enough water to fill 978,000 baths or flush a toilet 24million times.<\/p>\n Why does AI need so much energy?<\/p>\n ChatGPT is an example of generative AI \u2013 tech that can make content like text and images<\/a>. It can do this because it\u2019s a large language model, a neural network that learns by analysing data from across the internet.\u00a0<\/p>\n This requires staggering amounts of power to pull off, Morten Goodwin<\/a>, a professor at the University of Agder, Norway, told Metro<\/strong><\/p>\n \u2018Data must be transmitted, processed, and stored, whether the message is a complex request or a simple \u201cthank you\u201d,\u2019 the chief scientist at AI Experts<\/a> said.<\/p>\n \t\t \u2018The same is true for a Google search, an email, or a Teams meeting. You could even argue that humans saying \u201cthank you\u201d to each other also requires energy, albeit a very small amount.\u2019<\/p>\n Companies try to meet AI\u2019s insatiable hunger by using planet-warming fossil fuels, Dr Daniel Farrelly, principal lecturer in psychology at the University of Worcester, told Metro<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u2018All online activity has a carbon footprint, from using AI chatbots right down to sending text messages,\u2019 he said. <\/p>\n \u2018Although these single effects can often be small, they occur millions \u2013 billions \u2013 of times a day across the world, so the environmental impact from these, in total, can be considerable.<\/p>\n \u2018Combine this with the fact that these costs are invisible to us (compared to, say, the vapour trail we can see in the sky from the fuel that aeroplanes burn), it makes the potential impact on the environment of online activity a real issue.\u2019<\/p>\n Do we need to be polite to AI?<\/p>\n \t\t When it comes to chatbots, flattery will get you nowhere. Polite prompts have a \u2018negligible\u2019 effect on how well AI performs, a study <\/a>found. <\/p>\n Speaking to Metro<\/strong>, co-author Neil Johnson, a professor of physics at George Washington University, said: \u2018Are you nice to your toaster? We don\u2019t put birthday wrapping around the bread slice to make it look nicer.<\/p>\n \u2018Likewise, being nice to AI adds extra \u201cpacking\u201d words that can confuse it, and cost you and the company money \u2013 particularly if you are paying for your prompts to it.\u2019<\/p>\n Saying \u2018please\u2019 and \u2018thank you\u2019 adds to an AI\u2019s electricity bill because of how AI \u2018thinks\u2019, Robert Blackwell, a senior research associate at the Alan Turing Institute, explained to Metro<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u2018When chatting with an AI, words are tokenised \u2013 split into smaller pieces \u2013\u00a0 before being processed,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n \u2018The more tokens or words used, the higher the cost for the companies running these models.<\/p>\n \t\t \u2018Newer reasoning models use even more tokens as they try to justify and check their answers.\u2019<\/p>\n There are some reasons to be kind to AI, though. A growing amount of research<\/a> suggests that how we treat AI reflects how we treat one another.<\/p>\n Goodwin, who is also deputy director at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research, said that language models learn from the people who use them.<\/p>\n \u2018If you are polite everywhere, even to chatbots, the norm becomes to be polite,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n Why do we say please and thank you to AI?<\/p>\n A big draw to AI is how it can carry out tasks to an almost human-level proficiency. That\u2019s a lot for the average person to get their head around.<\/p>\n So we anthropomorphise AI \u2013 project human attributes onto objects \u2013 to make sense of \u2018something that feels human but isn\u2019t\u2019, Luise Freese, who runs the tech blog, M356 Princess<\/a>, told Metro<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \t\t Terminator is partly to blame, she joked, as AI is seen as exciting as it is scary.<\/p>\n \u2018The idea of robot overlords is burned into pop culture. So we joke and humanise these systems; it\u2019s a coping mechanism,\u2019 the Microsoft MVP winner for M365 development and Business Applications told Metro<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u2018But that\u2019s where it gets tricky: these tools don\u2019t have thoughts or feelings; they just mirror patterns. When we treat them like friends, we risk forgetting that.\u2019<\/p>\n Many chatbots make things up, something that happens so frequently that researchers had to make a word for it, \u2018hallucinating<\/a>\u2019. Medical experts have found that it comes up with phoney health studies, while mental health professionals worry about people turning to the bots for therapy.<\/a> <\/p>\n Some people place a lot of faith in AI, believing it has the same level of understanding and empathy as a human, when it does not, Ana Valdivia, a\u00a0departmental research lecturer in AI at Oxford, told Metro<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u2018The tendency to humanise AI isn\u2019t merely innocent curiosity,\u2019 she said, \u2018it is a byproduct of how these technologies are marketed and framed, often encouraging emotional dependency or misplaced trust in systems that are, at their core, mechanical.\u2019<\/p>\n Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk<\/a>.<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n For more stories like this, <\/strong>check our news page<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n \t\t\tComments Arrow\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/SEI_251529703-a382.jpg\")
\n\t\tAI chatbots make content by recreating what they see online (Picture: Jakub Porzycki\/NurPhoto\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n![\"Here's](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/SEI_251389196-fa1b.jpg\")
\n\t\tChatGPT wasn\u2019t too fussed when we asked it<\/p>\n![\"OpenAI](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/SEI_251529699-4b7a.jpg\")
\n\t\tOpenAI says that people being polite to ChatGPT costs the company \u2018tens of millions of dollars\u2019 (Picture: Bloomberg via Getty Images)<\/p>\n![\"No](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/SEI_243307465-d98d.jpg\")
\n\t\tThe Terminator franchise featured killer robots and a rogue AI system (Picture: StudioCanal\/REX\/Shutterstock)<\/p>\n
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\nMORE: Everything you need to know about the latest ChatGPT update<\/a><\/p>\n