If you read notalwaysright.com, there are a lot of stories along the following lines: - Rude and idiotic customer: <abuse abuse rant rant nonsensical demand no

If you read notalwaysright.com, there are a lot of stories along the following lines: - Rude and idiotic customer: <abuse abuse rant rant nonsensical demand nonsensical demand> - Retail worker: I do apologize, but ... This kind of excessive or unnecessary apology, even when the apologee is clearly the party who is in the wrong, is a distinctive feature of stories from the US, and while not unknown here is certainly very jarring to British and I suspect many other cultures' expectations. My (admittedly highly anecdotal) proposition is that it is a mutated form of politeness that is baked very strongly into specifically American social discourse, and, since human output from that nation forms a large proportion of GPT's training language, it has made its way into the language model.