Should we be polite to AIs?

I’ve been using Anthropic’s Claude.ai in a work context relatively often lately – to produce graphic illustrations, write summaries and so on. (I’m not crazy about referring to it as just “Claude”. That’s my grandfather.) One thing has struck me in those interactions: I’ve found myself saying “please” in the requests I make to it. I suppose you could say that’s just me being Canadian – for decades the not-entirely-fictional joke has been that Canadians are so polite they say “thank you” to bank machines. But Canadian or not, I think the point raises an interesting question: should we humans act politely toward large language models (LLMs) like Claude.ai and ChatGPT? I imagine many readers have a knee-jerk reaction of “of course not”. LLMs aren’t human, they aren’t alive, they aren’t conscious. They have no feelings to be hurt by our rudeness in the way a human being might be. Since the recipient of the words cannot actually be hurt by them, surely when an LLM screws up there’s nothing…