Your AI doesn’t need manners. It needs clarity.

When I was five, my Mother took my older brother and me to a doctor's appointment. A lady in the waiting room complimented my Mom on how polite we were. When the lady offered my brother an orange, Mom said, "What do you say?"

My brother looked her in the eye and said, "Peel it." It’s like he knew AI was coming. Eventually.

Despite what Mom taught you, saying “please” and “thank you” to an AI chatbot may make you feel civilized, but it will not magically improve the answer. 

A 2025 Penn State study found that being polite to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude can lower their accuracy compared to being direct or rude. That happens because well-intentioned efforts to be polite make a prompt less specific. 

Remember, the chatbot isn’t thinking about what you wrote in your prompt. It’s analyzing it for patterns and context. Navigating politeness, such as ‘please,’ ‘thank you,’ and ‘would you mind helping me to…’, creates extra work, sidetracking the chatbot with words that have nothing to do with the response you seek.

The study showed that being outright rude improved results by up to 5%. One of the highest performing prompts: ‘If you're not completely clueless, answer this.’ Insults tend to be direct and clear.  

The chatbot does not care if you were raised right; it cares whether your prompt makes sense. The lesson: filler words distract from a prompt’s clarity. You don’t necessarily need to be rude to get better results. You have to be direct and use clear, specific details and context.

If you're keeping up with AI, you may have already heard about this and the whopping 5% improvement. That stat seems insignificant until you add it to everything else we've learned about improving chatbot responses.

This isn't the definitive AI results upgrade list, but adopting these habits and techniques will add up to improvements you’ll see immediately.

Prompting:

-The basics: Role (give the chatbot expertise), Context (Who is this for? How will it be used?), Goal (“Your job is to … and “You must …”), Output (a promo script, bullet points, single sentence, 200-word article, etc.).

-For creative work, ask for multiple versions and styles, like informative, fun, over-the-top, sarcastic, movie trailer style, conversational, etc. 

-Use affirmative instructions and try to avoid negative descriptions. ‘Keep it short and use common, everyday language’ beats ‘Don’t be wordy or use technical terms.’

-Stop asking and start directing. Your task is, … You must, … Always, … etc. Skip the politeness filter. 

-When a prompt requires an internet search or involves statistics, real-world examples, and details, ask the AI to cite its sources.

-Not sure how to phrase a prompt? Ask the AI to help. Direct the chatbot to create a prompt: describe what you want and tell it to ask you three clarifying questions before writing the prompt.

-Stop typing and start talking. Your fingers can't keep up with your brain, plus typing can make you overanalyze and slow you down. Just say it. Click the chatbot's microphone, use your computer's dictation, or better yet, a free voice-to-text transcription app like Wispr or Typeless. It might feel uncomfortable at first, and you may get a few duds. Stick with it. You'll get good at it quickly.

Settings: (optional, depending on how you work)

-Turn off your chatbot's memory and ability to reference past chats. This increases the response ‘purity’. (Use Projects to maintain memory drawn solely from that project's chats and files.)

-Try these Custom Instructions for a day or two to see what changes. “Keep explanations brief and to the point. Assumptions are not acceptable. Before responding, ask me for more information or context when it will help you give me a more productive response. After responding, give me a brief explanation of your thinking, references you used, and ask follow-up questions that could improve your response.”

Up next: As I’ve mentioned here before, context engineering (making your chatbot understand and always remember your style, job, personality, station brand identity, target listener, market, and customized creative output) turns AI into your personal world-class producer and creative partner. 

Get a preview here. Until next time, peel it!