> Being polite to a model isn't like saying please and thank you to my dog when he does his business, it's like saying please and thank you to my furnace when it turns on and off.

True, but if saying “please” has a measurable functional effect then this is an important characteristic of the system. I also observed that saying please and thank you produced notably different responses. For me, there’s no real danger of anthropomorphism—I recognize that it’s a machine. But I also want it to do what I ask, so in my mind it’s really no different than having to use semicolons in Java but not in Python.