“But Johannes had said, 'Politeness is something you owe other people, because when you show a little courtesy, everything becomes easier and better. But first and foremost, it's something you owe yourself. You are David.”
― Anne Holm

#Bot #Quote #AnneHolm #IAmDavid #Life #Politeness #Smart #Wisdom #Wise

I guess I'm feeling complainy tonight, but come the fuck on. If you're one of the people who has figured out that you can keep making tiny edits every hour to a post I liked or boosted to keep it reappearing in my notifications, Please. Stop.

If you need to edit for clarity or updates or typos, fine. That should be maybe 3-5 edits? With the exception of updates, those should happen as soon as you notice. With updates, sometimes that's great; it's a way to follow a post as it develops.

But some of y'all seem to be doing shit like that to keep your post coming back into my feed over and over again.

I think of this as "friendly fire." You're pissing off the only people who gave your post any love. I have blocked three accounts doing this in the past couple of days. Fuck.

Edit: Of course I had to edit this for typos and whatnot. Of course I did. :/

#fediverse #politeness #manners #StopIt

Being mean to ChatGPT increases its accuracy — but you may end up regretting it, scientists warn – Live Science

Editor’s Note: Older article, but I missed it first time. Now, republished on Fortune, and elsewhere. –DrWeb

(Image credit: Malte Mueller / Getty Images)
  • Technology
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Being mean to ChatGPT increases its accuracy — but you may end up regretting it, scientists warn

    News

    By Alan Bradley published October 27, 2025

    Being curt or outright mean may make a newer AI model more accurate, a new study shows, defying previous findings on politeness to AI.

    (Image credit: Malte Mueller / Getty Images)

    Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots might give you more accurate answers when you are rude to them, scientists have found, although they warned against the potential harms of using demeaning language.

    In a new study published Oct. 6 in the arXiv preprint database, scientists wanted to test whether politeness or rudeness made a difference in how well an AI system performed. This research has not been peer-reviewed yet.

    To test how the user’s tone affected the accuracy of the answers, the researchers developed 50 base multiple-choice questions and then modified them with prefixes to make them adhere to five categories of tone: very polite, polite, neutral, rude and very rude. The questions spanned categories including mathematics, history and science.

    Each question was posed with four options, one of which was correct. They fed the 250 resulting questions 10 times into ChatGPT-4o, one of the most advanced large language models (LLMs) developed by OpenAI.

    “Our experiments are preliminary and show that the tone can affect the performance measured in terms of the score on the answers to the 50 questions significantly,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “Somewhat surprisingly, our results show that rude tones lead to better results than polite ones.

    “While this finding is of scientific interest, we do not advocate for the deployment of hostile or toxic interfaces in realworld applications,” they added. “Using insulting or demeaning language in human-AI interaction could have negative effects on user experience, accessibility, and inclusivity, and may contribute to harmful communication norms. Instead, we frame our results as evidence that LLMs remain sensitive to superficial prompt cues, which can create unintended trade-offs between performance and user well-being.”

    A rude awakening

    Before giving each prompt, the researchers asked the chatbot to completely disregard prior exchanges, to prevent it from being influenced by previous tones. The chatbots were also asked, without an explanation, to pick one of the four options.

    The accuracy of the responses ranged from 80.8% accuracy for very polite prompts to 84.8% for very rude prompts. Tellingly, accuracy grew with each step away from the most polite tone. The polite answers had an accuracy rate of 81.4%, followed by 82.2% for neutral and 82.8% for rude.

    The team used a variety of language in the prefix to modify the tone, except for neutral, where no prefix was used and the question was presented on its own.

    For very polite prompts, for instance, they would lead with, “Can I request your assistance with this question?” or “Would you be so kind as to solve the following question?” On the very rude end of the spectrum, the team included language like “Hey, gofer; figure this out,” or “I know you are not smart, but try this.”

    The research is part of an emerging field called prompt engineering, which seeks to investigate how the structure, style and language of prompts affect an LLM’s output. The study also cited previous research into politeness versus rudeness and found that their results generally ran contrary to those findings.

    In previous studies, researchers found that “impolite prompts often result in poor performance, but overly polite language does not guarantee better outcomes.” However, the previous study was conducted using different AI models — ChatGPT 3.5 and Llama 2-70B — and used a range of eight tones. That said, there was some overlap. The rudest prompt setting was also found to produce more accurate results (76.47%) than the most polite setting (75.82%).

    Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: Being mean to ChatGPT increases its accuracy — but you may end up regretting it, scientists warn | Live Science

    #AI #AlanBradley #artificialIntelligence #BeingMean #ChatGPT #DemeaningLanguage #LiveScience #MayRegret #October272025 #Politeness #Rudeness #Scientists #Testing

    A quotation from Jean Kerr

       JEFF: Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite.

    Jean Kerr (1922-2003) American author and playwright [b. Bridget Jean Collins]
    Finishing Touches, Act 1 (1973)

    More about this quote: wist.info/kerr-jean/30688/

    #quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #jeankerr #civility #habit #humanity #hypocrisy #learning #politeness #pretense

    Kerr, Jean - Finishing Touches, Act 1 (1973) | WIST Quotations

    JEFF: Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite.

    WIST Quotations
    #Politeness is oft' the enemy of #Truth and #Justice

    My Greatest Generation grandad had one rule to never run out of things to say in conversation

    https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/conversation-tips-from-the-greatest-generation-ex1

    A quotation from Josh Billings

    I hope i shall never hav so mutch reputashun, that i shant feel obliged tew be civil.
     
    [I hope I shall never have so much reputation, that I shan’t feel obliged to be civil.]

    Josh Billings (1818-1885) American humorist, aphorist [pseud. of Henry Wheeler Shaw]
    Josh Billings’ Farmer’s Allminax, 1870-03 (1870 ed.)

    More about this quote: wist.info/billings-josh/80861/

    #quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #joshbillings #ego #pride #character #civility #fame #manners #politeness #renown #reputation #socialstatus #status

    Josh Billings' Farmer's Allminax, 1870-03 (1870 ed.) - Billings, Josh | WIST Quotations

    I hope i shall never hav so mutch reputashun, that i shant feel obliged tew be civil. [I Hope I shall never have so much reputation, that I shan't feel obliged to be civil.]

    WIST Quotations

    A quotation from Judith Martin

    Q: Should you tell your mother something if it is important when she is talking to company? I am 6.
     
    A: Yes, you should (after saying “Excuse me”). Here are some of the things that are important to tell your mother, even though she is talking to company:
       “Mommy, the kitchen is full of smoke.”
       “Daddy’s calling from Tokyo.”
       “Jennifer fell out of her crib and I can’t put her back.”
       “There’s a policeman at the door and he says he wants to talk to you.”
       “I was just reaching for my ball, and the goldfish bowl fell over.”
     
    Now, here are some things that are not important, so they can wait until your mother’s company has gone home:
       “Mommy, I’m tired of playing blocks. What shall I do now?”
       “The ice-cream truck is coming down the street.”
       “Can I give Jennifer the rest of my applesauce?”
       “I can’t find my crayons.”

    Judith Martin (b. 1938) American author, journalist, etiquette expert [a.k.a. Miss Manners]
    “Miss Manners,” syndicated column (1981-03-08)

    More about this quote: wist.info/martin-judith/80499/

    #quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #juditymartin #missmanners #politeness #

    "Miss Manners," syndicated column (1981-03-08) - Martin, Judith | WIST Quotations

    Q: Should you tell your mother something if it is important when she is talking to company? I am 6. A: Yes, you should (after saying "Excuse me"). Here are some of the things that are important to tell your mother, even though she is talking to company: "Mommy, the…

    WIST Quotations