A recent global survey reveals a surprising trend: a significant portion of artificial intelligence users worldwide regularly employ polite phrases, indicating evolving human-AI interaction dynamics. This study offers compelling digital behavior insights into how individuals engage with AI tools across various cultures.
Conducted by YouGov between June and July 2025, the extensive survey gathered responses from over 12,000 AI users across 17 diverse countries, providing a comprehensive look at global AI etiquette. The findings highlight stark cross-cultural differences in how politeness is extended to intelligent machines.
These detailed insights into user courtesy echo earlier comments from OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, who notably stated in April 2025 that the considerable electricity costs incurred from polite AI interactions amount to “tens of millions of dollars well spent,” underscoring the prevalence and perhaps unexpected value of such technology trends.
While 18% of the global artificial intelligence user base consistently uses polite expressions, an almost equal 17% never do so, painting a picture of diverse approaches to AI etiquette. Countries like India, Mexico, and the UAE emerge as leaders in AI courtesy, with over 50% of their users frequently or always saying “please” or “thank you” to their digital assistants.
Conversely, Denmark, Sweden, and the United States exhibit the lowest rates of AI politeness, with more than 40% of users in these nations rarely or never extending such courtesies to artificial intelligence. Interestingly, Canadians, often stereotyped for their politeness, align perfectly with the global survey average, suggesting this cultural trait might be more pronounced in human-to-human interactions.
Further analysis of digital behavior reveals a subtle yet noticeable gender disparity in AI politeness across the 17 surveyed countries. Female AI users are marginally more inclined to consistently use polite language with AI assistants compared to their male counterparts, indicating a nuanced aspect of human-AI interaction that warrants further study.
However, this general trend of women being more polite to artificial intelligence is notably bucked in Nordic countries. In Denmark, 34% of male AI users offer polite statements, whereas only 29% of Danish women do. Sweden shows an even more pronounced difference, with a 13 percentage-point gap (40% men vs. 27% women) in favor of male politeness to AI.
The United States, however, presents the most significant gender gap in the opposite direction, with female AI users being 14 percentage points more likely than men to use polite language with artificial intelligence tools. Similar disparities, where women consistently show more courtesy in their AI interactions, are also observed in Italy, India, and Germany, highlighting complex regional variations in digital behavior.
Within the United States, variations in AI etiquette are also evident across different social media platforms. Users of X (formerly Twitter) are the most likely to never use polite language with artificial intelligence, with 22% reporting this behavior. In contrast, users on LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, and TikTok exhibit higher levels of courtesy, with approximately 25-30% always or often using polite words with AI. This complex interplay of user demographics and platform-specific digital behavior offers rich insights into the future of human-AI interaction.
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