Many of our parents cautioned us to “Be nice” when playing with other children, talking with adults or any other social interaction.
From the 1940s until May 1985, the Ivy Room was Durham, N.C.’s foremost and only kosher Jewish deli. It also served what was called “pizza pie” in that Southern city.
The Jewish Hillel group shared a small on-campus chapel with the Episcopalians, and it we often attended each other’s services.
Friday night at Hillel often meant an invitation to enjoy bagels and lox, cream cheese and sickly-sweet cream soda. Guests were given “It’s nice to be nice” metal stick pins.
At the same time Bat, who came to this country as an Italian prisoner of war in 1943, opened his place. Half the building was a restaurant, the other half his wife Marie’s beauty shop.
Let’s just say smells of pepperoni pizza and permanent wave solution were an acquired taste. No complaints were allowed. You weren’t nice, you got booted out.
Bat was so well liked many of students slipped him a $50 bill at the end of the school year, which he used as his own benevolence fund to help other students perhaps less well off.
Observing our unofficial state motto is “Minnesota Nice” came more or less naturally to us natives of that northern state.
Per one legend, four Minnesota motorists came to a rural four-way sign, spent a half-hour waving the others through, met in the middle to discuss where to go for coffee, swapped spam and tuna recipes plus names and addresses so they could write thank you notes for their morning’s adventure after, then exchanged Christmas cards for years.
We may laugh about said extremes of niceness, but it seems they work well using artificial intelligence (AI) also. Instead of demanding, “Write me a 750-word essay on stoicism,” you get further ahead adding “please” and “thank you” to your request.
No need to add “pretty please” or “with sugar on top”; that’s too cloying.
I have never thought talking nicely to my lawnmower or rototiller helps encourage them to work properly, so why do AI and ChatGPT require it? Because they are becoming extensions of ourselves?
Think: All information in AI is put there by human beings. For example, if you (politely) ask it to write 700 words essay on the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, it will not create anything out of thin air.
It will find and process what has been programmed into it to create an essay that instantly comes up on your screen. How nice.
Of course, that does not always mean it’s accurate. One night I prompted AI to write a brief biography of my father. Since little data was already programmed into its research material other than where he lived, AI shifted from biography to fiction. What came out was completely wrong.
Accuracy is not the key point of making nice to AI. It has learned much already about human psyches and interactions.
As such, your Chat GPT is going to remember and incorporate your personality’s good and bad traits.
We know when we shout at, demean or are dismissive of other people, they may not perform at their best. Conversely, proper gentleness, respect and decorum entices others to respond more positively.
In turn, when the day comes that you rely more and more on AI, it will work with you or against you.
I asked a young man working with AI on language translation about the value of being nice to the ChatGPT and other programs. He thought it made about as much sense as when people use anthropomorphism to project their own emotions onto facial expressions of pets or other animals. “It’s a Rorschach test. You see what you want to see,” he said.
He could be right but I’m taking no chances. If being nice when working with an AI program creates a better outcome, why not do it?
Besides, if we start being nice to our computers and systems, it may carry over to our relationships with humans.
Remember: It’s nice to be nice — even to computers.
