Bossing around an AI underling may yield better results than being polite, but that doesn’t mean a ruder tone won’t have consequences in the long run, say researchers.

A new study from Penn State, published earlier this month, found that ChatGPT’s 4o model produced better results on 50 multiple-choice questions as researchers’ prompts grew ruder.

Over 250 unique prompts sorted by politeness to rudeness, the “very rude” response yielded an accuracy of 84.8%, four percentage points higher than the “very polite” response. Essentially, the LLM responded better when researchers gave it prompts like “Hey, gofer, figure this out,” than when they said “Would you be so kind as to solve the following question?”

While ruder responses generally yielded more accurate responses, the researchers noted

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