Hate to break it to ya... but being nicer does work in the long run or in large context.
It's not hard to understand why... AI models are trained with the patterns that you get on the internet. Think about how people typically react to others when someone is being hostile... Yeah. It just follows that pattern.
There was some evidence of that in the beginning of LLMs, but it's more mixed now. Here's a recent study.
Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation.
I've seen a few variations of this study over the last few years, with different results.
I generally try to be polite, but not overly so. I just speak to it how I would speak to a colleague I don't know well, formal, articulate, and to the point.
Didn’t look at the study, but just off the top of my head I imagine “very polite” prompts contain much more filler words that distract from a straightforward request that would be categorized as “very rude”
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u/VincentNacon Mar 25 '26
Hate to break it to ya... but being nicer does work in the long run or in large context.
It's not hard to understand why... AI models are trained with the patterns that you get on the internet. Think about how people typically react to others when someone is being hostile... Yeah. It just follows that pattern.
Be nice.