In a surprising twist of digital etiquette, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that users who say “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT may be contributing to millions of dollars in additional operational costs.

ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot, interprets language through “tokens”—small chunks of text that fuel its conversational magic. The catch? Every word counts. And when millions of users insist on being courteous, those extra tokens quickly stack up.“People being polite to ChatGPT? We love it. But also… it’s costing us,” joked Altman in a recent interview. “All those kind souls adding ‘please’ and ‘I love you’—they’re slowly bleeding our servers dry.”

A casual user put this to the test by messaging the bot: “Hello, please, I love you.” The result? Eight tokens. While that may seem small, OpenAI processes billions of tokens per day—meaning polite chatter comes with a big carbon and financial footprint.

Still, experts agree the trade-off might be worth it. “We’d rather people treat AI nicely,” said one developer. “If only the same courtesy extended to customer service reps.”

As for users? They remain unfazed. “Enough, I got it,” one ChatGPT user said when asked about the impact.