A few months ago, I wrote an article about my mother’s complex feeling toward Alexa. It seems like it’s not only my mother.

The other day, a blog article about “How To Write A Blog with ChatGPT” caught people’s attention. The focus was not about the article itself though. It was about his friend’s comment after seeing the screenshot he posted in the article.

“You’re a jerk. You’ve never used ‘please’ to us. Why are you nice to AI?”

The author’s “excuse” was he wants to be on AI’s good side. Wait! Is AI a new Santa Claus??? When something happens to us, not our friends but AI will help us?

A new study from Duke developmental psychologists asked 4 to 11-year-old kids’ empathy towards Alexa and Roomba. Although they understand robots don’t feel pains, they think robots don’t deserve to be yelled at or hit. As they get older, they understand you do have the freedom to harm robots although they still think it’s not great.

On the other hand, a new University of Michigan study shows humans are less forgiving of robots after multiple mistakes—and the trust is difficult to get back however robots apologize and promise that the mistake will never happen again.

So…do you use “please” when you ask AI to do something?