Being polite to artificial intelligence could help AI agents deliver better results, according to New York Times tech reporter Erin Griffith, who discussed the idea in an episode of the newspaper's Hard Fork podcast. In a promotional Instagram clip, the newspaper highlighted the advice: 'You should be nice to your AI agents, not only to be moral, but also to get the best performance from them.'
In a separate discussion on the same podcast, Griffith joined Times religion correspondent Elizabeth Dias and opinion writer David Wallace-Wells to examine Anthropic's private meetings with religious scholars about AI consciousness and how to make its Claude chatbot 'good'. The 9 October episode explored the tech company's efforts to draw on religious and philosophical ideas to shape AI behaviour, as questions about machine consciousness continue to fuel debate.
