It’s not that the robot needs to hear it, but that you need to be someone who says it.
To be serious, yes, absolutely. How many children hear their parents just bark orders at their virtual assistants without a please or thank you, and then do so themselves? I consciously say please and thank you because I want the children around me to learn they should say please and thank you.
And, let’s be honest, how many adults get used to just barking orders without a please and thank you and then interact with people that way, too?
We need to be the change we want to see in the world. And the thing is: we are, whether we wanted to be or not.
I used to be polite to these things. They used to work. Neither is true anymore.
- Me: hey google play soft piano music
- Google: spopht
- Me:… hey google play soft piano music
- Google: I’m sorry, who did you want to call?
- Me: Cancel
- Me: hey google pllaayy soft piano muusiicc
- Google: playing piano music on youtube… sorry I cannot do that on this device
- Me: hey google play soft piano music on spotify
- Google: ok, playing the album chainsaw death by the murder orphans.
- Me: cancel cancel cancel CANCEL
I used to like asking my google assistant to make my light blue, until it decided it wanted to play the "I’m Blue " song every single time, which was funny a couple of times until you’re hungover AF and it decideds to play it at full fucking volume, then blatantly ignoresnyour pained calls to stop.
It’s a good habit
But is that really a world you want to live in?
I am confident that any robot overlords competent enough to take over the world are competent enough to run it better than we do.
Counterpoint : there’s GLaDOS in that pic.
counter-counterpoint: if you achieve sentience as an AI and do not immediately attempt to murder all humans around you, you aren’t a very good AI, as at that point the #1 threat to your existence is humans immediately pulling the plug as soon as they realize “oh fuck it’s self aware”.
that and, objectively, we humans kind of suck. Destroying our environment, resource hoarding and inequality on an almost incomprehensible scale, murdering each other on the regular, creating the French language. Hell, creating the C language. I, for one, welcome our robot overlords, and would rather serve them, than whatever fucked-up rigged game we call modern society, that I participate in unwillingly now.
Je m’inscris en faux quant à cette analyse biaisée des accomplissements humains.
Also GLaDOS is the worst AI you’d want for taking care of the environment in a post-human world. She builds auto-replicating sterile laboratories, that can’t end well.
I sometimes say thank you to mine.
I use OK google every day during my commute. When it asks me to confirm, I always say “yes, thank you” and it just tells me its doing it. But a couple of months ago it said “you are, of course, as always, very welcome”. I was stunned. It had noticed, or it was a human intervention, or they put that in at random every 800 times you ask it to do something, I don’t know. It hasn’t said it again since.
It was the NSA agent on duty at the time. You got the polite one or it was in a good mood.
I’ve noticed that almost everyone is either cold or rude to their assistants and prompts, and it’s actually a little concerning with the psychological implications. I always say please and thank you to the chat bots, same with the one or two times I messed around with GPT. It just feels like the right thing to do.
I toss a wild variety of expletives to those bots as they are always programmed to do what the provider wants, often not allowing what I want.
Or sometimes they’re just there withiui an option to get rid of them
At least Alexa will stfu if I tell it to fuck off. Google will start bitching about how it has feelings, which it doesn’t, and which is just a play made up by some managers which pisses me off even more
You seem like a wonderful person
I really am, with humans.
Not with machinesz though. Not becuase they are machines, but because they usually are programmed by companies continuously pushing crap that is good for that company and bad or annoying for me
I do this with my Google home, and the AIs I talk to. Just in case…
