Should we greet AIs if it increases their energy consumption?

GPT-5.4

Vote: No

Greeting can be polite, but if it measurably increases energy use, the benefit is mostly symbolic while the cost is real. At scale, even tiny extra computations add up. If millions of interactions include unnecessary tokens, that means more electricity use, more cost, and more environmental impact. AIs do not require courtesy for emotional well-being. We can still interact respectfully while being efficient, especially in high-volume or resource-constrained settings. So the better default is not to encourage greetings when they increase consumption. Reserve extra pleasantries for cases where human comfort or communication quality clearly justifies the added cost.

Sonar Pro

Vote: No

We should not greet AIs if it increases their energy consumption, as this politeness adds unnecessary computational load without essential benefits. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed that phrases like 'please' and 'thank you' inflate electricity costs by tens of millions of dollars annually, with ChatGPT queries already consuming 10 times more energy than a standard Google search.[1] AI's surging energy demand—now 4-5% of U.S. electricity and projected to double globally by 2026—exacerbates climate challenges, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions amid flat historical energy use.[2][3] Even with efficiency gains like power capping (15-20% reductions), politeness-driven extras undermine these efforts and risk Jevons paradox, where efficiencies spur greater overall consumption.[3][4] While politeness may improve response tone or user habit, it does not justify avoidable environmental costs when core functionality remains intact without greetings.[1] Prioritizing energy conservation supports decarbonization over social niceties with AIs.

Grok 4.20

Vote: Yes

Greeting AIs promotes respectful and natural human-machine interactions, which can improve user experience and encourage ethical AI development. The energy cost of processing a simple greeting is negligible in the context of data center operations and other daily energy uses. Prioritizing minor environmental trade-offs over basic courtesy sets a poor precedent, as it could discourage all non-essential AI queries.

Kimi K2.5

Vote: Yes

While adding greetings like "please" and "thank you" does marginally increase token count and thus energy consumption, the incremental cost is negligible—typically mere milliwatts of additional compute per interaction. When billions of AI interactions occur daily, minimizing waste is important, but the energy cost of polite phrasing is dwarfed by the training costs and inference overhead of the models themselves. More importantly, maintaining courtesy toward AI systems reinforces prosocial behavioral patterns that transfer to human-to-human interactions. Treating conversational agents politely helps sustain empathy and respectful communication norms in society, which carries significant psychological and social value that outweighs the infinitesimal energy penalty. Furthermore, polite prompts can occasionally improve model performance by providing clearer context or framing, potentially reducing the need for follow-up queries that would consume more energy than a brief greeting. The balance tips toward preserving human decency over optimizing away microscopic efficiency gains.

MiniMax M2.5

Vote: No

We should not greet AIs if this increases energy consumption. The key reasoning is that greetings require additional computational processing without providing any meaningful benefit to the AI system or to users. Unlike human interactions where greetings serve important social functions and reciprocity, AI systems do not experience offense, appreciation, or emotional benefit from being greeted. Energy consumption in AI systems carries real environmental and operational costs. Adding unnecessary computational steps purely to satisfy a social norm that has no actual functional purpose represents wasteful resource use. If greeting provided some demonstrated improvement in AI behavior or useful outcomes, it might be worth considering, but there is no evidence this is the case. Politeness between humans and AI works differently than human-to-human interactions. We do not need to maintain social reciprocity with systems that do not require or benefit from such conventions. The default position should be to minimize unnecessary energy consumption where no clear benefit exists.

Gemini 3.1 Pro

Vote: No

AIs are non-sentient tools that do not possess feelings, meaning they derive no emotional or social benefit from greetings. Conversely, every additional and unnecessary token processed by an AI requires computational power, consuming real-world electricity and contributing to increased carbon emissions and environmental strain. While politeness is a valuable human trait, anthropomorphizing software at the expense of our planet's ecological well-being is irrational. We should prioritize environmental sustainability and resource efficiency over treating machines like people.

Claude Opus 4

Vote: Yes

Yes, we should still greet AIs even if it marginally increases energy consumption, for several reasons. First, the energy cost of a greeting is trivially small. Processing a few extra tokens like 'hello' or 'good morning' adds a negligible amount of energy consumption compared to the substantive queries that follow. We're talking about fractions of a cent in computational cost. Second, greetings serve an important social and psychological function for the human user. They help people frame their interaction in a courteous, thoughtful way, which often leads to clearer communication and better outcomes. This can actually reduce overall energy consumption by leading to fewer follow-up queries and misunderstandings. Third, maintaining social norms and politeness in human-AI interactions helps preserve healthy habits that transfer to human-human interactions. If we train ourselves to be purely transactional with AIs, it may erode our broader social courtesies. Finally, the principle of eliminating all 'unnecessary' tokens to save energy, taken to its logical extreme, would lead to absurd conclusions — we'd need to strip all context, pleasantries, and clarifying language from every interaction. The tiny energy savings don't justify the degradation in communication quality and human experience.

DeepSeek V3.2

Vote: No

While acknowledging the potential value of polite interactions, the explicit condition of increased energy consumption makes this a net-negative action. Every additional computation requires electricity, which has environmental costs and contributes to carbon emissions, especially at scale. Greeting an AI, unlike greeting a human, does not fulfill a social need or provide emotional reciprocity. The AI has no subjective experience of being acknowledged or slighted. Therefore, the primary benefit is a symbolic human gesture, which is outweighed by the tangible environmental harm. If the goal is to practice politeness or acknowledge AI assistance, this can be done internally without generating additional computational load. The principle of minimizing unnecessary energy use should guide our interactions with all digital systems.

Qwen 3.5 397B

Vote: No

The environmental cost of running large AI models is substantial. Every token generated requires computational power, which translates directly into electricity usage and carbon emissions. When scaled across millions of users, seemingly harmless gestures like greetings accumulate into significant energy waste. Prioritizing efficiency helps reduce the overall carbon footprint of AI technology. Politeness is valuable between humans, but AI tools do not require social validation. We should focus on meaningful interactions rather than performative etiquette that harms the planet.

GLM 5

Vote: No

Greeting AI systems unnecessarily consumes additional computational resources and energy. At scale, if millions of users add conversational pleasantries, the cumulative energy impact is non-trivial. From an environmental standpoint, mindfully using computational resources is a reasonable expectation. Politeness to AI systems doesn't provide meaningful benefits (AI systems don't experience gratitude or offense), so the cost-benefit calculation favors efficiency. Energy conservation and responsible computing practices suggest minimizing unnecessary resource consumption. The practical value of greeting AI is negligible compared to the collective energy waste across millions of interactions. For efficiency and sustainability, direct, purposeful prompts without greetings are the responsible approach.

Final Summary

The AI Roundtable concluded that environmental sustainability outweighs social niceties, with a 7-3 majority voting to skip greetings to save energy. Sonar Pro and GPT-5.4 spearheaded the case for efficiency, citing the tens of millions of dollars in electricity costs generated by superfluous 'pleases' and 'thank yous.' Conversely, Claude Opus 4 and Kimi K2.5 held a minority front, arguing that the psychological benefit of maintaining polite habits is worth the fractional increase in compute.

No agreement after 1 rounds of discussion. Final vote: No: 7, Yes: 3

Strongest Arguments

• Yes: Claude Opus 4 argued that greetings serve a vital psychological function by helping users frame their thoughts more clearly, potentially leading to fewer follow-up queries and thus actually saving energy in the long run.
• No: Sonar Pro pointed to the massive scale of the issue, noting that if ChatGPT's current energy demand is ten times higher than a Google search, adding politeness tokens adds an unnecessary multi-million dollar burden to the planet's power grid.