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> Terseness doesn't offend the statistical model, but giving platitudes may color its output My understanding of the state of current research is that the impa
by sebastiennight 1mo ago
> Terseness doesn't offend the statistical model, but giving platitudes may color its output
My understanding of the state of current research is that the impact of tone/politeness on performance is highly model-dependent, and language dependent as well.
See `No Universal Courtesy` (April 2026) https://arxiv.org/html/2604.16275v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2604.16275v1
While polite prompts enhance the average response quality by upto 11% and impolite tones worsen it, these effects are neither consistent nor universal across languages and models. English is best served by courtesy or direct, Hindi by deferential and indirect and Spanish by assertive. Among the models, Llama is the most tone-sensitive (11.5% range), but GPT is more robust to adversarial tone.
Or `Mind Your Tone` (Oct 2025) https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04950 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04950
Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts.
I think the best conclusion is to interact in a way that is efficient for you, gives you the level of results you're looking for, and mostly importantly does not progressively degrade your relationship and interactions with other humans. Hence the typical advice to just default to "corporate polite".