From being polite to pretending you’re on Star Trek, the advice you get about talking to chatbots can be truly bizarre, and totally useless. Here’s what actually works.

When a group of researchers decided to test whether “positive thinking” made AI chatbots more accurate, it led to some surprising results. As they asked various chatbots questions, they tried calling the AIs “smart”, encouraged them to think carefully and even ended their questions with “This will be fun!” None of it made a consistent difference, but one technique stood out. When they made an artificial intelligence pretend it was on Star Trek, it got better at basic maths. Beam me up, I guess.

People have all sorts of bizarre strategies to get better responses from large language models (LLMs), the AI technology behind tools like ChatGPT. Some swear AI does better if you threaten it, others think chatbots are more cooperative if you’re polite and some people ask the robots to role-play as experts in whatever subject they’re working on. The list goes on. It’s part of the mythology around “prompt engineering” or “context engineering” – different ways to construct instructions to make AI deliver better results. Here’s the thing: experts tell me that a lot of accepted wisdom about prompting AI simply doesn’t work. In some cases, it could even be dangerous. But the way you talk to an AI does matter, and some techniques really will make a difference.

“A lot of people think there’s some magic set of words you can use that will make LLMs solve a problem,” says Jules White, a computer science professor who studies generative AI at Vanderbilt University in the US. “But it’s not about word choice, it’s about how you fundamentally express what you’re trying to do.”

Mind your manners?

In 2025, a user on X (formerly Twitter) posted a tweet asking, “I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models”. Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, responded. “Tens of millions of dollars well spent,” he said. “You never know.”