Questão de Inglês — Interpretação de Textos (Understanding) — VUNESP 2026

Do you have to be polite to AI?

1 When a group of researchers decided to test whether “positive thinking” made Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots¹ more precise, they obtained some surprising results. As they asked various chatbots questions, they tried calling the AIs “smart”, encouraged them to think carefully and even ended their questions with “This will be fun!” None of it made a consistent difference.

People have all sorts of bizarre strategies to get better responses from large language models (LLMs), the AI technology behind tools like ChatGPT. Some say AI does better if you threaten it, others think chatbots are more cooperative if you’re polite and some people ask the robots to act as experts in whatever subject they’re working on. The list goes on. It’s part of the mythology around “prompt² engineering” — different ways to construct instructions to make AI deliver better results.

Companies design AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini to behave like people, so it makes sense they can sometimes seem as if they have moods you can manage or personalities you can control. However, AI tools are mimics, not living beings. They’re just simulating human behaviour. If you want better answers, stop treating AI like a person and start treating it like a tool.

If you are going to use LLMs, learning to get what you want faster and more efficiently will be better for you. One tip is: provide the AI with a sample whenever possible. “For instance, I see people ask an LLM to write an email and then get frustrated because ‘it doesn’t sound like me at all’,” says Jules White, a generative AI researcher at Vanderbilt University in the United States. The natural impulse is to respond with a list of instructions, “do this” and “don’t do that”. White says it’s much more effective to say “here are 10 emails I’ve sent in the past, use my writing style”.

• Pleases and thank yous

5 According to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, more than half of Americans say “please” when they’re talking to their smart speakers. And a 2025 survey by the Future Magazine found 70% of people are polite to AI when they use it. “Saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ might make you more comfortable interacting with the AI,” says Sander Schulhoff, who researches prompt engineering. “It’s not helping the performance of the model, but if it’s helping you use the model more because you’re more comfortable, then it’s useful.”

You can’t hurt AIs feelings because it doesn’t have any, but maybe you should be nice anyway. It’s a habit that could benefit other parts of your life.

(Thomas Germain. www.bbc.com, 25.02.2026. Adaptado.)