ChatGPT’s waffle costs electricity too

I was fascinated by Kevin Mellor’s Star Letter in Issue 714 (‘Being polite to ChatGPT is like saying please to your toaster’). He’s right, of course, that the chatbot has “absolutely no humanity”, but recently I had a rather tricky personal problem that I shared with it and was amazed at the apparent insight and sensitivity it displayed and which helped me a great deal. I felt quite moved by it and told it that I knew it made no sense to say ‘Thank you’ to a machine but, well, I felt I just simp...