Thomas Aquinas believed cruelty to animals was wrong not because animals have souls (and with that all the standard moral rights), but because it can teach us cruelty to other humans.

Genuine question: do you add 'please' and 'thank you' to Google searches? If not, what sets them apart?

I also remember reading a long time ago someone who wrote that they wanted to be polite to an LLM because after they prompted it to learn about whether politeness was good for improving accuracy of responses, they got a message that led them to conclude that politeness could probably help. It seems a bit odd then because I have heard so much about how people use LLMs' responses about themselves to learn about LLMs themselves, but that seems like it is a suspicious approach.

Is it worth getting worse results for that reason? From the article:

"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. These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation. "

I am not polite to LLMs because I do not want to anthropomorphise them.

There's also awareness of the basilisk...

Me too! You've said exactly what I was about to say. Anyone else feel that way?