Analysing The Effects of Politeness on GPT-4 — Soft Prompt Engineering

Saying “please” and “thank you” sometimes pays off more than we think.

Luca Santinelli
5 min readJul 21, 2023

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Politeness is more than a set of social norms; it forms the underpinning of communication, embodying respect and mutual understanding. This article offers an in-depth exploration of how politeness, expressed through words like "please" and "thank you," affects the outputs of OpenAI's GPT-4. By examining the immediate and long-term reactions of this language model, we seek to shed light on the complexities of politeness within AI dialogue and predict future trends.

Dissecting the Immediate Response

GPT-4's sophisticated design allows it to incorporate the nuances of polite words present in prompts, subtly altering its immediate responses. Let's observe a Python snippet:

Dissecting the Immediate Response

Assuming that our API key is active, this code will result in an output like:

"The Pythagorean theorem is a fundamental principle in geometry, stating that in a right-angled triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right

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