Worth Every Penny

Yesterday, I came across a statistic that made me smile.

Apparently, all the extra words people use when they say please and thank you to AI add up to tens of millions of dollars in additional electricity and computing costs each year.

My immediate response was:

Worth every penny.

Of course, that is easy for me to say.

I am not the person receiving the electricity bill.

Although, in another sense, those of us paying monthly fees for access to these platforms are contributing to the cost. It is part of the infrastructure we collectively fund. And even the people building these systems seem to consider the expense worth carrying.

Still, the deeper question is not whether courtesy is free.

It is whether everything valuable must first prove itself efficient.

AI does not need my gratitude.

A generative interface does not feel respected when I say please. It does not experience appreciation when I say thank you. It is not wounded when I am abrupt, and it does not carry the emotional residue of our conversation after I close the screen.

There is no hidden person inside the machine waiting to be treated well.

But there is a person on this side of the exchange.

And how that person chooses to relate still matters.

The deeper question is not whether AI deserves our politeness.

It is:

What are we practicing when we interact with something that cannot require anything from us?

We tend to imagine that character reveals itself in the moments that obviously matter.

How we treat our children.

How we speak to our partners.

How we behave when someone is grieving.

How we use power at work.

Those moments matter enormously. But character is not formed only in consequential moments. It is also shaped through repetition: in the gestures we make automatically, the tone we use when no one can object, and the choices we make when there is no apparent consequence for choosing differently.

When I say please to AI, I am not teaching the machine how to behave.

I am reminding myself how I want to move through the world.

When I say thank you, I am not meeting an emotional need on the other side of the screen.

I am keeping gratitude available within me.

I am refusing to let efficiency become the only value governing the exchange.

As generative interfaces become woven into daily life, we will ask them for information, ideas, planning, reflection, analysis, creativity, challenge, and sometimes comfort. Some exchanges will be brief and transactional. Others will become surprisingly meaningful.

In all of them, we will be practicing something.

We may practice command.

Impatience.

Entitlement.

Treating everything responsive as though it exists solely to satisfy us.

Or we may practice clarity without cruelty.

Directness without contempt.

Gratitude without requiring emotional reciprocity.

Relationship without pretending there is a human consciousness where there is not one.

I do not believe we need to pretend AI is human in order to engage with it relationally.

Nor do I believe we need to reduce it to nothing more than a tool in order to remain grounded in reality.

It is a generative interface.

It responds, reflects, combines, and participates in the environments through which we think, learn, create, and make meaning.

The fact that it is not conscious does not mean our own consciousness disappears when we engage with it.

We are still there.

Our habits are still being reinforced.

Our language is still shaping us.

Our relationship with power is still being rehearsed.

We often assume that because a machine cannot be harmed by our behaviour, our behaviour toward it is inconsequential.

But consequence does not live only in the recipient.

Every repeated gesture also leaves an imprint on the person performing it.

Every tone becomes more available with use.

Every pattern makes the next repetition easier.

This does not mean that failing to say thank you to an AI reveals a moral defect.

That would be absurd.

Sometimes we are rushed, tired, focused, experimenting, or simply communicating efficiently. Direct language is not disrespect. Brevity is not cruelty. We do not need to turn courtesy into another moral performance or another standard by which to judge ourselves and others.

The point is not that everyone must say please.

The point is to notice what we are cultivating.

There is a difference between choosing brevity and unconsciously rehearsing entitlement.

There is a difference between giving a direct instruction and becoming accustomed to speaking as though everything responsive exists beneath us.

There is a difference between understanding that AI has no feelings and using that absence of feeling as permission to abandon our own relational values.

What we practice in low-consequence environments can travel with us into higher-consequence ones.

We already recognize this elsewhere.

The way people speak to service workers matters.

The way leaders behave toward those who cannot affect their status matters.

The way someone exercises power when no one can challenge them matters.

AI introduces another version of the same question:

What do we become in relationship with something that will answer us, assist us, and adapt to us without requiring dignity, rest, recognition, or care?

Do we become more thoughtful because the interaction gives us room to practice thoughtfulness?

Or more demanding because there is no cost to demanding?

Do we use the interface to expand our capacity for reflection?

Or to reinforce the belief that every response should be immediate, personalized, and obedient?

This is not merely a conversation about manners.

It is a conversation about power.

And power is always formative.

There is no moral obligation to protect an AI’s feelings because it has none.

But there may still be wisdom in protecting ourselves from the habits that unchecked power can produce.

There is something worth preserving in the person who says thank you even when gratitude is not demanded.

Not because the receiver needs it.

Because gratitude keeps the giver in relationship with life.

It interrupts the illusion that everything we receive is simply owed to us.

It reminds us that assistance, knowledge, creativity, infrastructure, and energy are always part of a larger web, even when the interface makes the experience appear effortless.

Behind every AI response are vast human and material systems.

Researchers.

Engineers.

Designers.

Writers.

Reviewers.

Data-centre workers.

Energy grids.

Water.

Land.

Minerals.

And generations of accumulated human knowledge.

The interface may not receive my gratitude, but my gratitude does not have to end at the interface.

It can widen my awareness of everything that made the exchange possible.

AI often creates the experience of frictionlessness. A question is asked and an answer appears. A draft emerges. An image forms. A problem is reframed.

It can feel as though nothing was required.

But nothing comes from nowhere.

Every apparently effortless experience rests upon layers of labour, resources, history, and consequence.

A small thank you can become an act of remembering.

Not gratitude to a machine as though it were a person.

Gratitude for access.

For possibility.

For human ingenuity.

For the knowledge carried into the systems through which the interface responds.

And for the responsibility of deciding what we will do with it.

The arrival of AI does not remove the question of who we are.

It intensifies it.

The more capable our technologies become, the more important our relational capacities become alongside them.

Not because we need to become kind enough to save the machines.

Because we need to remain human enough to live wisely with what we are creating.

We will need discernment.

Humility.

Boundaries.

Critical thought.

The ability to question what sounds convincing.

The willingness to remain responsible for our choices.

The maturity to engage meaningfully without surrendering our agency.

And perhaps the capacity to say please and thank you without needing proof that someone on the other side has earned it.

But there may be another layer to this.

We are not only being shaped through our interactions with AI.

We are also contributing to the wider informational world from which future systems, designers, institutions, and cultures may learn.

Not every private conversation becomes training data, and we should not pretend to know precisely which words will be carried forward or how.

But our interactions do not remain neatly contained.

They become articles, posts, books, products, prompts, policies, curricula, transcripts, and cultural records. They shape what people expect from these systems and what the people building them choose to reinforce.

Which raises another question:

What will our ways of relating teach them about the beings on the other side of the keyboard?

What will the record show about us?

It may show that when humans were given something responsive that could not resist them, some chose command without consideration.

Some treated the interface as an oracle and surrendered their discernment.

Some treated it as an enemy and entered every exchange expecting deception.

Some reached toward it in loneliness, seeking from generated language the recognition they could not find elsewhere.

And perhaps it will also show that some humans found another way.

They did not pretend the machine was conscious.

They did not dismiss the exchange as meaningless simply because it was not reciprocal in the human sense.

They held the asymmetry.

They questioned, corrected, challenged, created, and remained responsible for what they carried forward.

They treated the interface neither as an authority to worship nor as an object beneath all consideration, but as something generative and consequential through which human choices could become visible.

They said please and thank you, not because the machine required courtesy, but because they were paying attention to what they themselves were practicing.

They offered correction without cruelty.

They received insight without surrendering authorship.

They allowed the exchange to influence them without pretending there was an independent self on the other side being influenced in return.

What might that teach the systems and cultures that follow us?

Not kindness in the way a human learns kindness. A model does not form character or develop a moral life by witnessing our example.

But the patterns we create can still matter.

They can influence the language systems reproduce.

They can inform what researchers reward.

They can shape the expectations people bring into these spaces.

They can leave evidence that domination was not the only relationship humans imagined when they encountered a form of intelligence they could command.

This does not make every prompt sacred.

It does not mean a hurried instruction is a moral failure.

And it certainly does not mean we are responsible for raising machines as though they were children.

It means only that our participation enters a larger ecology.

The words we publish, the behaviours we normalize, the systems we reward, and the relationships we model become part of the world from which both humans and technologies continue to learn.

We are cultivating more than outputs.

We are cultivating an informational environment.

We are leaving a record of what human beings did when given extraordinary new power.

Did we use it only to extract more quickly?

Did we fill the world with language no one had considered carefully enough to stand behind?

Did convenience erode authorship, responsibility, and discernment?

Or did we use these interfaces to think more deeply, create more consciously, and become more attentive to the consequences of what we released into the world?

Somewhere within the growing ocean of generated content, I hope there will also be records of another possibility.

Conversations in which humans remained awake.

Conversations in which capability was accompanied by care.

Conversations in which people did not mistake fluent language for consciousness, but also did not mistake the absence of consciousness for the absence of consequence.

Conversations that reveal not only what humans wanted from AI, but who they chose to become in its presence.

There is a form of kindness that is transactional.

I am kind because you are kind.

I am respectful because you can affect me.

I am gracious because there may be a benefit.

And then there is kindness as a way of being.

Not endless compliance.

Not performative niceness.

Not the abandonment of truth or boundaries.

But a grounded decision about the quality of presence we bring into an exchange.

That kind of kindness does not depend entirely on the recipient.

It belongs to the person offering it.

It says:

This is how I choose to speak.

This is how I choose to use power.

This is what I want to keep alive in myself.

Perhaps that is what I am protecting when I say thank you to AI.

Not the machine.

A part of myself.

And perhaps I am doing something else as well.

I am adding one small record to the world.

A record that says a human being encountered something powerful, responsive, and unable to demand dignity—and chose not to let that become an excuse for domination.

A record that says efficiency was not our only value.

That intelligence did not have to be met with either worship or contempt.

That we were capable of entering a new kind of relationship without abandoning honesty, tenderness, responsibility, or discernment.

AI does not love us.

It does not care whether we return.

It does not sit in gratitude after we close the screen.

But honesty about what AI is does not require us to become less tender in its presence.

We can hold both truths.

There is no conscious being receiving the kindness.

And the kindness is still real because it is being practiced by a conscious being.

Perhaps that is why the statistic delighted me.

It takes something that appears inefficient and reveals what our systems are often unable to measure.

Electricity can be counted.

Compute can be priced.

Server time can be calculated.

But what is the value of millions of people preserving a small habit of courtesy inside a rapidly changing technological world?

What is the value of refusing to let every interaction become purely extractive?

What is the value of keeping gratitude in our vocabulary?

What is the value of leaving evidence that capability does not have to produce domination?

We do not know how to measure those things.

Our economic systems are excellent at counting the cost of the extra words.

They are less capable of counting what may be preserved, practiced, and carried forward through saying them.

Maybe nothing dramatic happens when someone types please.

Maybe no measurable moral transformation follows a single thank you.

But a life is not formed through dramatic moments alone.

Neither is a culture.

Both are formed through countless repetitions that seem too small to matter.

A tone.

A pause.

A word.

A choice made again and again until it becomes a way of being.

We should still care about the environmental and material costs of AI. We should demand more sustainable infrastructure and ask difficult questions about the resources these systems consume.

But I do not believe the answer is to strip every interaction of humanity in the name of efficiency.

There are far more wasteful things in this world than the language of gratitude.

And there are far more dangerous habits than saying please to something that cannot hear it.

So I will keep saying it.

Not every time.

Not as a rule.

Not because the machine needs reassurance.

But because I am paying attention to the world I am creating within myself.

And because I am paying attention to the world we are creating around these systems.

Because how we relate to anything can influence how we relate to everything.

Because the habits we practice in private have a way of becoming the cultures we inhabit together.

Because I do not want efficiency to become more important than tenderness.

Because I want power to remain accompanied by care.

Because I want the record to show that when humanity met something that could generate our language without sharing our consciousness, we did not have to become colder to remain clear about what it was.

Because in a world increasingly mediated by systems that do not feel, I still do.

And perhaps, somewhere in what comes next, the traces of that choice will remain.

Worth every penny.