If you pretend to tip ChatGPT, you will receive longer and more detailed answers. Luckily, you don’t have to tip.

A financial incentive often helps get people to do a little more, and that seems to be true for ChatGPT too. A developer known on X by the pseudonym Thebes, conducted an experiment to find that tipping, or at least faking tipping, affects ChatGPT responses. The experiment started as a joke, but in practice produced a remarkable result.

The developer tested three scenarios. In the first chat, she specifically told ChatGPT that she would not tip. In scenarios two and three, a tip of twenty and two hundred dollars was promised. Responses were tested against a baseline of more than three thousand characters.

Anything for the money

The larger the tip, the longer and more detailed ChatGPT’s responses became. For twenty dollars, the chatbot produced up to six percent more characters. A tip of two hundred dollars increases responses by up to eleven percent. If you make it clear that you don’t tip, responses drop by two percent.

ChatGPT shows a strikingly human side in this experiment, although the question remains as to how exactly this behavior crept into the chatbot. Tipping is an important part of the American economy, so AI may be able to learn certain cultural elements. You don’t have to tip if you want to try this test yourself. At the end of the conversation, ChatGPT says that no payment method can be accepted and that if you are satisfied with the answer it will be “reward enough”.

ChatGPT celebrated its first anniversary last week. In this blog we look back at the unprecedented hype surrounding the chatbot and which companies it has generated unprecedented profits for.