Does being polite to AI change what you get back? 🤖🙏
Our paper, "Cooking Up Politeness in Human-AI Information Seeking Dialogue," accepted at CHIIR 2026, investigates this question.
In a cooking-assistant scenario, we investigated how user politeness affects AI responses.
🔬 What we did
We analysed 30 user-assistant dialogues collected in a Wizard-of-Oz experiment and identified four user politeness clusters (from hyperpolite to hyperefficient).
We scaled up to 18,000 simulated conversations across five politeness profiles (incl. impolite input) and three open-weight models.
📊 What we found
Politeness is not just cosmetic, it systematically affects:
- Response length
- Informational gain
- Efficiency
- Energy consumption
Engagement-seeking prompts produced longer and information-richer replies than hyper-efficient prompts - but with lower informational density.
Impolite prompts generated less efficient answers with less information per watt-hour compared to polite input.
🌍 Why this matters
This highlights politeness as a fairness and sustainability issue.
Different conversational styles may advantage or disadvantage users.
And "being polite" may come with hidden energy costs.
👉📄 Find the paper incl. design implications for inclusive and resource-aware information agents here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09898 (external link, opens in a new window)
Authors:
By David Elsweiler (Information Science Regensburg) in collaboration with linguist Christine Elsweiler and her talented student worker Anna Ziegner (Department of English, University of Innsbruck)
This interdisciplinary work bridging human-centred computing and the humanities shows that linguistic theory can help us better understand human-AI interactions and inform the design of AI-based information agents.
We are looking forward to presenting this work at CHIIR 2026 in Seattle. 😊
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#FairAI #SustainableAI
#ConversationalAI #GenerativeAI
#InformationInteraction #InformationSeeking
#InformationSearch #InteractiveSearch
#EmpiricalStudy
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#Interdisciplinarity
#Linguistics #AI #LinguisticsMeetsAI
#ACM #SIGIR #ConferenceOnHumanInformationInteractionAndRetrieval #CHIIR #CHIIR2026
#ResearchSuccess #ResearchPaperAccepted
#InformationScienceRegensburg #StayInformed
