Being nice to ChatGPT might be bad for the environment. Here's why.

A silhouette of a person holding a phone with the ChatGPT logo on screen in front of an abstract background with the OpenAI logo.

Manners don't cost a thing. At least, that's what I was told when I was growing up.

Then again, I wasn't raised inside OpenAI's thousand-GPU data center in Quincy, Washington. If I had been, I might have had a more nuanced perspective on the impact of "please" and "thank you" on the company's bottom line.